repairing rita.....

[peeperita]

playing around with my reflectors again.....and the result was a trainwreck of differing light sources, background distractions, and a white balance that was anything but......

although in editing, everything came out in the wash.....i began by using a soft,fair sized brush and cloning out the background elements as well as a few dust spots...once that was agreeable, i selected my new crop which minimized the effect of the shallow depth of field i was forced into by cropping out rita's feet..with curves, i brought up the exposure and fine tuned the colors individually as the shadows went an awkward shade of blue.....then time for a little sharpening to see just how much detail i could get out of her eyes.....sadly, it did nothing for them, but it did groom her feathers a bit....so, i added a soft white brush to her eye and set it's layer to soft light and captured a bit of the detail back from that oh so black eye.....still it lacked a proper catchlight so i created one from a hard white brush along the upper left edge of the eye......i clipped it with a semi-soft eraser so that just one small quadrant of it was left....(this tickled me pink because i swear it looks real).....my last move was to add a dark brown vignette to the background....erasing the bits on rita and lowered the opacity to almost nothing......

oh!.....i did do a few dots of soft white over some of the sections of her body that didn't come up as light as i had wanted to when i used curves......there's a few layers of those...especially on her lower belly where her legs start.....

anyway, it was a recovery that i'm proud of because i feel as if it came out looking like i had shot it right in the first place......please feel free to ask me explain further on any of my steps.....

thanks for your time

peeper

[KodiakStar]

Great save, looks like that bird has quite a personality

[FocalFrenzy]

Great job saving this one. Is this where you got your user-name? All this time, I thought your name was Rita.

[peeperita]

Originally Posted by KodiakStar

Great save, looks like that bird has quite a personality

Originally Posted by FocalFrenzy

Great job saving this one. Is this where you got your user-name? All this time, I thought your name was Rita.

she's exactly where i got my name....all these years now and she still thinks i hung the moon......it was only right that i honor her back....

thanks, you two.....

[foxor]

I love it! Especially the eye...great job there

[windrider86]

Great save!!!
I had an umbrella for many years named Tuki. For the past 24 years I have a red lored amazon named Angel. altjho she is anything but...............

[sandman935]

Definitely an improvement. Good work.

[peeperita]

Originally Posted by foxor

I love it! Especially the eye...great job there

that's the one little bit that really got me pumped....

Originally Posted by windrider86

Great save!!!
I had an umbrella for many years named Tuki. For the past 24 years I have a red lored amazon named Angel. altjho she is anything but...............

i just knew you were a bird person....rita is all that and a bag of chips.....and according to her.....so am i....

Originally Posted by sandman935

Definitely an improvement. Good work.

thank you.....i was soooo disappointed out of camera.....i had to use an excruciatingly small depth of field for the light and her movement, so most of the shots were out of focus.....this was one of the few that had enough detail to work with....