{"id":3442,"date":"2010-12-25T19:34:29","date_gmt":"2010-12-25T23:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/?p=3442"},"modified":"2011-02-24T11:43:03","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T15:43:03","slug":"my-thoughts-on-the-young-bald-eagle-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/2010\/12\/25\/my-thoughts-on-the-young-bald-eagle-image\/","title":{"rendered":"My Thoughts on the Young Bald Eagle Image"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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My Thoughts on the Young Bald Eagle Image<\/h2>\n

First off, I hope that all of you are enjoying the holiday season with friends and family. I enjoyed a rare dessert after lunch today: my 88 year old Mom made an ice box cake from scratch at my request and I had a 3.5 ounce slice. Mmmmm good. I could have eaten the whole thing!<\/p>\n

Taking a close look at the animated GIF above reveals the most obvious before and after changes. The two most important for me were the removal of the single blade of out-of-focus grass that overlapped the two broad feathers on the right wing just above the tail. If anyone knows for sure which feather tract they belong to I would appreciate knowing. I suspect that they are great coverts…. <\/p>\n

In any case, we learned here<\/a> that out-of-focus foreground elements tend to be quite distracting whether they intersect with the subject or not. First I used Divide and Conquer Cloning; this allowed me to use the Patch Tool to eliminate most of that big blade of grass. Then I needed a few small Quick Masks in the area where the blade of grass intersected the white feather edging. Working very large I used the Patch Tool to eliminate a white speck on a nearby feather. Even Joerg Rockenberger who did an excellent job with his comments missed that one \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n

That brings up an important point: with the ever-increasing inter-activity here if you do not either check out the comments regularly or subscribe to new comments you will often be missing a ton of good stuff. <\/p>\n

Next I eliminated the o-o-f yellow grass blade on the bottom frame edge just to the right of where I had been working. I should have also eliminated a similar blade of grass near the lower right corner. Most folks picked up on the removal of the significant black speck lower right center. I used a small Quick Mask to cover that.<\/p>\n

Next I used the Quick Selection Tool (thanks to Denise Ippolito<\/a> for the how-to lesson on that one) to select the light areas of the lores and the lower mandible. Before putting the selection on its own layer I ran Refine Edge (Alt\/Ctrl\/R) with my soften-the-edge settings: Smooth: 4; Feather: 2.0 px; Contrast: 0; Shift Edge: 0. Then I ran a 15% Linear Burn on the selection and increased the YELLOW saturation (Ctrl U for Hue-Saturation on a layer). <\/p>\n

Next I added two points of BLACK to the BLACKs and the NEUTRALS via my Selective Color action (the f\/9 key for me). I do that to probably 95% of my images to yield a slight contrast boost. Lastly I hit my f\/4 key to apply the Linear Contrast (RGB) Curves preset to the whole image and reduced the Opacity on that to 25% as it looked overdone. <\/p>\n

I am fairly sure that but for the Quick Selection Tool every single Photoshop technique that I mentioned above along with my complete digital workflow is detailed in our Digital Basics File<\/a> (a PDF that we send by e-mail.) Simply put it is the cheapest high quality Photoshop instruction on the planet and includes free updates for as long as I am pushing the shutter button. Instructions on how to use the Quick Selection Tool will be part of the next update. The last update included a complete rewrite and reorganization. <\/p>\n

Lastly I was surprised that several folks suggested getting rid of blade of grass with the seed heads to the left of the young eagle’s head; I chose to leave that one as it balanced nicely with the seed heads on the right side of the image. <\/p>\n

BIRDS AS ART NOTES\/December 22, 2010<\/h2>\n

The BIRDS AS ART NOTES OF December 22, 2010 are on-line and can be viewed here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here are the features:<\/p>\n

Features<\/h3>\n
    \n
  • BARNEGAT JETTY INSTRUCTION<\/li>\n
  • THE BARNEGAT JETTY SITE GUIDE<\/li>\n
  • Japan in Winter “Only One Trip in a Lifetime Needed IPT.”<\/li>\n
  • SHOPPER’S GUIDE<\/li>\n
  • IPT UPDATES<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n<\/p>\n

    My Thoughts on the Young Bald Eagle Image <\/p>\n

    First off, I hope that all of you are enjoying the holiday season with friends and family. I enjoyed a rare dessert after lunch today: my 88 year old Mom made an ice box cake from scratch at my request and I had a 3.5 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[89,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-89","category-misc","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}