Parrots

[Isac]

#1 - Rainbow Lorikeets

#2 - Twenty Eight Parrot. The 18-400 at full zoom gives a nice bokeh.

[HansE]

Great colours. Makes you glad you bought that lens no doubt.

[Isac]

Cheers Hans. the 18-400 is a permanent attachment to the 7Dii. It covers everything I shoot. Very happy with its performance so far.

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day mate

2- beaut pics here .... with #1 looking like many of mine where 'they' are just too high in the tree, however ...
#2 is a fine portrait of the bird and your have done well here

suggestion ... pop into Levels and slide mid-range contrast down to 0,85 to 0,9 and see if you like it better ~ I suspect that once the BG is toned town the bird's colours will stand out a bit more
Phil

[Isac]

Cheers Phil. I've played with the lighting in PS. I gather you'd like to see the BG lighting adjusted downwards, so I did that as well as a couple of other tweaks. I used a mask so as not to change the lighting on the bird. I did a black and white using the calculations method just to see what it looked like.

Whaddayathink?

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day mate

The mono is not a goer for me - as the wonderful colours of the bird are important visually
On my laptop screen !! the first pic seemed a tad bright - so the darkening slightly made it sparkle. Your edit comes close to what my mods did on my screen

Phil

[Isac]

Thanks Phil. Just playing with the B&W, thinking of my father's Box Brownie Flash III that he bought when I was a kid. He had it for years and took 100's of pics.

[HansE]

Another way of doing that is to select the lab colour mode. in channels select lightnes then have a look and adjust with (levels and) curves.

[Isac]

Cheers Hans. I've been using Lab Color Mode for ages (from when you first suggested it). I liked it so much that I wrote an action for it. It makes a copy of the document, sets the color profile to Lab Color Mode and then adds an AUTO Curves Layer to it and resets the Color Profile back to RGB Color. Really makes the images pop! I never liked the AUTO Curves default settings, so I changed it as below. In the action recording, I just click on AUTO in the Curves Layer settings and it sets the Curves to the NEW DEFAULT. If you reset the Curves default AUTO settings, it's produces much better results.

To do that, try this:

Add a Curves layer to the layer you want to adjust.
Hold Alt/Option and click on the curves layer AUTO button.


Within the "Auto Color Correction Options - Algorithms:", select either:

1. "Enhance Per Channel Contrast"
OR
2. "Find Dark or Light Colors".

Then...
3. Check the Option: "Snap Neutral Midtones".
4. Check "Save as default" and click OK.


Now you only need to create the Curves Layer and click AUTO to get a much better result.

[HansE]

I will have a look at that when I get a minute.