How and Why I edit my bird images.
I quite often get asked “What is your workflow for editing your bird images?” To be totally truthful my workflow really is different for nearly every shot I take. The important thing you need to do is to learn to critic your own work. Does it require editing even?
In the case of a lot of my bird images all I need to do is to crop or occasionally resize my image. However I’m very critical of my own work and I have to stress to all I’m not a wildlife photographer. I’m a photographer who takes a lot of wildlife images but I always take them in a more of an art form way than most true recorders of wildlife. I’m not worried if the bird is a rarity or a simple sparrow, I’m more concerned of what makes a good looking image, capturing behaviour, a nice pose or an action shot. That also comes into play with my editing, A lot of my shots are straight from the camera, however, I’m not scared to remove something or to do a lot of editing if I think it looks good. I will also edit my images into the realms of fine art at times simply because my photography is more based on potential customers rather than competition work. For example one of my recent shots that I personally really like is species wise not really exciting, it’s of 2 very common gulls on my local pond. However it took an hour of shooting to get what I set out for to capture the action of these acrobatic subjects..
This shot above was exactly what I set out to capture, and that to me means more than capturing a record shot of an elusive species. However despite capturing the shot I wanted to take it further. There was other birds in the background, there wasn’t a definite nice separation between the subject and the background. Therefore the background was defused to enhance the effect in post processing. The method I used can be seen in the PART 2 of the series of videos I have created below.
The First video shows a technique using my own created Frequency Separation which requires an Photoshop Action I created. This is available for download at the very cheap price of £5.00 (all the proceeds go to funding equipment for our training and Community Classes. If you wish to purchase it contact us using the email on the beginning of the video and we will give details on how to pay and how to install the action in PS.
In the second part of these tutorials I show how to create a blur to the background to give either the look of an 500mm f4 prime, a fineart look or simply remove distractions from the image to concentrate on the subject.