And I´m staying logged on!

This hummer looks more beautiful every each time you take it's photo! Great, Peter!

Great picture Peter, and I'm glad you can stay logged on. I still can't use the emoticons.

birdlegs
zone 5
S.E. Lower MI.

I spoke too soon. I can not stay logged on.

I think I'd trade being logged on for a picture like that. Beautiful hummer!

Joan Garvey - Metairie, LA Zone 9

Nice one Peter, you left a trail with your cloning though, needs a bit more cleaning up, give the bird some more room on the right and you will have a real wall hanger there.

Let me know if you need any help with it.







Martin

--

Vancouver Island, zone 8B

Nikon D70/D200 300 f4 af-s, 400 2.8 af-i

www.frogpondphotography.com

www.frogpondphotography.blogspot.com

wow... I want one of those.


**********
Farmer Steve
Deluz, CA (hand-grown CA avocados) usda zone 10a

Thanks Martin yes I see that on the larger image. What I´d really like to have though are your PP sharpening skills.

My sharpening for birds is really simple but it all depends on the tool chain you are using.

I do the sharpening in three steps:

1) Capture sharpening.
2) Creative sharpening.
3) Output sharpening.

Capture sharpening is where you remove the blur which is inherent in most digital captures this is caused by the way the photo sights are arranged and the anti-aliasing filter that is used to blur the stair step effect in straight lines and the moire in patterns. I do this step in my raw converter, these days I usually use Adobe Capture Raw and use the default sharpening or a bit less, this level of sharpening should be subtle and you shouldn't see it cause any artifacts.

Creative sharpening, is where you brush in were you want the sharpening, with birds I usually use highpass sharpening using the Light Right Studio sharpening toolkit, there very good and are free, there a set of actions that work with Adobe Photoshop. http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/TLRSharpeningToolkit.htm

Output sharpening, depends on your ouput medium, when printing I will use the sharpening in Qimage to the final sharpening and for the web I let smugmug do the final sharpening when they do the resizing.

Sounds complected but most pictures only take a few minutes of processing to get it all done including the sharpening.






Martin
--
Vancouver Island, zone 8B
Nikon D70/D200 300 f4 af-s, 400 2.8 af-i
www.frogpondphotography.com
www.frogpondphotography.blogspot.com

Thank you Martin, that´s great information and will take me a while to digest. One question, can these programs be used with Photoshop Elements or do you need to have a more sophisticated program installed?

Adobe Capture Raw will work with Elements, you have to match the version of acr with the version of Elements you use and to the camera model you have.

The latest version works with Elements 6 and 7.
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4220

From what I can see the tlr actions work with Photoshop, not sure they will work with Elements, you can give it a try and see if they work.





Martin
--
Vancouver Island, zone 8B
Nikon D70/D200 300 f4 af-s, 400 2.8 af-i
www.frogpondphotography.com
www.frogpondphotography.blogspot.com

Ok thank you.