Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/12/14
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]With the cold rainy/snowy weather we've had lately I've had time to go back to older photos to see what I could make of them. I've learned a bit about photoshop in the last few years thanks to many on these lists so I'm trying to improve on photos that didn't quite do it for me the first time around. This is probably old hat to many of you but bear with me, I'm learning this stuff. The photo I've been working on this last week is a Western Bluebird, photographed locally in March 2007. The bird was in the deep shade of an oak forest, the only light on the bird was sunlight filtered through the forest canopy. Very green. Until this week I haven't been satisfied with the color balance; with a good background color that looks like oak forest, the bird's colors are way off. With the color balance adjusted for the bird, the background looks like crap: http://www.wildlightphoto.com/temp/webl06bg.jpg http://www.wildlightphoto.com/temp/webl06fg.jpg Previously I tried to find a happy medium between these two, but the medium I landed on was anything but happy. For the last week or so I've been working on another approach: I split the photo into foreground and background layers, applied separate color correction to suit each layer, then combined them, erasing the background areas from the foreground layer. Here's the result: http://www.wildlightphoto.com/birds/turdidae/webl06.jpg Comments and suggested alternate approaches to this problem are welcome (but keep in mind the most advanced software I have is PS6). Doug Herr Birdman of Sacramento http://www.wildlightphoto.com