About the Shot
Firstly, welcome to the first article in what I plan to be a series about how to edit wildlife and nature photography! This shot was tricky to edit for a variety of reasons. First, I was photographing some hummingbirds at feeders in the wonderful garden at San Luis Canopy, in San Ramón, Costa Rica. This Green-crowned Brilliant decided to perch on a branch in the shade about ten meters (thirty feet) from me. It was raining off and on so already there wasn’t a lot of light available. What did help is that I was shooting on a tripod. In fact, because the hummingbird was quite far away even the “before” picture above is heavily cropped.
Want to edit along? Download the RAW File from my Google Drive.
EXIF Data & Explanation
Camera: Sony a7iv
Lens: Sony 200-600 mm f/5.6-6.3
ISO8000 | 600 mm | f/6.3 | 1/400
This is a pretty standard “its overcast and not very bright” image setting. I was shooting wide open and as slow as I dare go with hummingbirds (and even then a lot of the shots of the bird were affected by movement). Without running it through DXO Pure RAW the image would’ve been unusable.
Edits
I do most of my editing in Adobe Lightroom. My first step when editing an image is applying one of the Prosets made by Glenn Bartley and Jan Wegner. In this case, I went with #23 – FILL FLASH – Flat because of the bird being in the shadow compared to the background.
My second step was to take it into Photoshop and do some object removal. I wanted to get rid of all the leaves and sticks that distracted from the bird. Normally I do object removal after I do some adjustments, but in this case I found it so distracting to look at that it prevented me from visualizing the final result so I wanted to get them out of the way first.
Quick tip: When doing object remove near to your subject or another object (like the stick running through the hummingbird) use the clone stamp tool to create a bit of separation between the object and what you want to remove. The content aware fill tool works a lot better that way.
At this point I had made the following adjustments (anything not mentioned wasn’t adjusted):
- Exposure: +.36
- Highlights: -64
- Shadows: -17
- Blacks: -31
- Dehaze: -11
- Vibrance: +21
- Saturation+2
Now this is getting closer but there are still a few touchups. I almost always use a combination of DXO Pure RAW and Topaz DeNoise AI on my images. At this point I took the image into Topax to knock out the background noise.
Half the fun of editing is playing around. Sometimes you look away from the screen and go yeah that wasn’t right. In my final edit I decided the raise the blacks to +81 (from -21) but then create a Color Range Mask that selected the dark area underneath the bird’s tail. I then brought the blacks back down in that region by -20.
My final two steps on my current editing flow are to add a vignette and a radial gradiant around the bird’s eye. I do a small radial gradient where I add a touch of exposure and dehaze to the eye. And finally I add a vignette to the image with the goal of drawing the viewer’s eye to the lightest part of the image (the subject).
Conclusion
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