food

banehawi (Critique Team)

8

1 Jan 2011 - 3:59 PM

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Its a really nice shot.

Theres good dof, and the important parts of the squirrel are sharp. One thing to remember - after you re size for EPZ, check the new image for sharpness and apply more sharpening as needed. This does benefit with a little more. Also, make sure you convert the colour space to sRGB for the WEB.

I agree the bottom bar can go, but I would suggest an alternate approach to the crop in that I would either keep the width, as in mod1, or crop to place an eye on a third as in mod2.

Brens mod is good, and using the "auto" functions can often give a good result, though a more accurate approach is to use the Threshold and Curves approach which I have done in the mods.
In addition, when contrast is increased, you may need to reduce saturation to balance colour.

Theres a number of tutorials on correcting white balance and colour balance on the Web using Google.

The tonal range is compressed as you can see with the histogram bunched up in the middle, and results in a flat image with low contrast. This is due largely to poor light conditions at the time of shooting. If you look closely, you will notice the black bar is bot solid black, and the whites are a bluish/gray. The corrections in all mods have addressed this.


Hope this is helpful,



Regards



Willie

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NEWMANP (Critique Team)

5

1 Jan 2011 - 8:34 PM

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hello,
nice shot head on to the squirrel, there is just a little bit too much going on and a crop is required to concentrate attention onto the hands and face. the limited depth of field that you have achieved works well in this respect and has managed to retain sharpness in both the hands and eyes.

i thought the exposure looked a little flat so i checked the histograph and the dark end pointer (left side) needed dragging in to achieve a full range of tones. the whites were similarly adrift but trimming in the whites would have blow the background and created too much conflict of attention.

you need to be a little careful here with any saturations and colour balance adjustments because this is a grey squirrel not a red one and its so easy to enhance the red tones too much until they become unatural.

i did a cropped mod and gave a little more contrast by trimmimg in the dark tones to the histograph. then a slight desaturation before smart sharpening sharpening the central area at about 60% with a small rad

i think there is a really nice shot in here waiting to be brought out,
best regards and HNY
pHIL

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