Big Snake

[epeyton@tampabay.rr.com]

Is there anything I can do in editing that would make his face (eyes) sharper? I have photoshop CS2, Thanks

[Saralonde]

Whoa, can't look at this too long, but the title warned me! Lovely colors he has. Blue towel mildly distracting, but I'd keep my eyes on the snake!

[Dazyl]

Saralonde -- I think that's his tail rather than a blue towel.... (not absolutely sure, of course).

The slight softness around his face (eyes) is probably because the focus spot appears to be a tad further back. Other than selectively sharpening the eyes, I'm not sure what you can do about it (though there are some brilliant post-processing folks here...)

As Saralonde says, he (she?) is lovely (for a snake... ). The colors, in particular, are quite pretty. The highlights seem to be somewhat overblown, though. Have you tried darkening them?

[praesentire]

This may be a good candidate for B&W. The blue channel looks nice!

[ELAY]

Is this a domestic scene? As in, came home and found this on your porch? One thing about Ottawa -- lots of snow, but no big snakes around the house (to be fair we do get some biggish brown watersnakes sometimes).

I think the head needs contrast more than anything else to make it more prominent, and unfortunately the scales there are very bright (along with the rest of the shot). If I try to add contrast in curves or levels, it just adds a grey cast to the whole shot -- ruining the lovely colours elsewhere on this reptile.

I tried a few things, and nothing really worked very well. Best results came from a bit of levels, a light contrast mask to tone down the blown highlights, curves after the mask, and some smart sharpening over the eye area - I'll post it, hoping you don't mind my having fiddled with your shot a bit (let me know if you do). I found that if I sharpened the whole pic, I lost a fair amount of the nice colouring, which is why I tried the eyes only.



Not a lot of improvement I don't think, and even though I went lightly with the contrast mask and adjustments I lost some of the colour, especially on the scales sort of centre left. Not worrying about the blowouts and just doing the sharpening might have been better.

Praesentire is onto something though -- a BW from the channel mixer, at something like 60% blue and 40% green looks very good.

EL

[mappleby]

I love the position of the snake and the way he seems to be starring up at you from behind his body. I agree that this might look really good as a B&W. The only thing for me is it seems a little washed out. Perhaps if exposure was stepped down a bit...

Take care

[Saralonde]

Originally Posted by Dazyl

Saralonde -- I think that's his tail rather than a blue towel.... (not absolutely sure, of course).

Shows you how much I know about snakes!

[epeyton@tampabay.rr.com]

Thank you all, The snake was in the Jacksonville Zoo behind very thick glass. The towel is actually his rattler. Thanks for telling how you tried to fix my picture. I am going to work on making it B&W.

[pma]

Increase the contrast and darken the blacks. Try that and see what you can get from it.

[epeyton@tampabay.rr.com]

Ok so I have tried Black and White what do you think?