A little bird I encountered on my last hike through Peterson Creek Park before the challenge ended. This is about as much wildlife as one can encounter there.. unfortunately. I played around with the cropping and stuff on this photo for awhile, and finally decided to try my hand at selective desat, since this is a member challenge, and I think this piece lends itself well to it.
Post processing included: Cropping, resizing, USM, noise reduction, selective desat, selective saturation on the bird, and curves on the bird to stand it out.
Statistics
Place: 108 out of 160 Avg (all users): 5.2680 Avg (commenters): 6.1111 Avg (participants): 4.9167 Avg (non-participants): 5.6122 Views since voting: 878 Views during voting: 300 Votes: 194 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
Even with the selective desat the first thing I notice about this (other than a vaguely distracting blue blur) is the beautiful texture and tones in the bark. Then I get to looking at the bird and it is very pretty but I can't see enough detail (nor is there a catchlight in the eye to draw me in closer) and I'm quickly losing focus and back to those wonderful bark and funghi textures. I don't think it's that the bird isn't beautiful or interesting but that, for me, it's overshadowed by the tree itself. I wonder how it would look if perched on a duller tree? Of course I don't know if it's a bird that only ever perches in one tree type so...
sweet. was this little guy actually blue or was that hue shifting at play? selective desaturation is nowhere near my favourite technique, but works well enough here. in fact he might have disappeared without it, so no deductions from me :) nice job.
Nice application of selective colorization to really make the colors of the bird pop. Some may say this is "overdone" or whatever but I really like it. -9-
My first observation is that selective desat has been used to accentuate the colours of the bird. My second observation is there is an ever so slight amount of motion blur and/or bird movement. I would have hoped that a bird of such colour would do well on its own to stand out against bleak bark. I don't use a voting system that adds points for this or subtracts points for that; I sort of just let the mouse click where it may, guided mostly by my gut. On the grand scheme of wildlife photography, bird images in particular, and this challenge especially, this is an average photo so I probably wouldn't give it higher than 6 (and probably a 5). Since I don't think these numbers mean anything, I'm giving you a multidigit score (a non-degenerative one).
Great choice for a desat photo. I love the blues in the feathers. Focus appears to be a bit soft on the bird but better on the tree. I am guessing you had to zoom a bit for this. I like your choice for composition/framing. Nice image. :o)
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