Egrets and Post Processing

Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF 600mm f/4 L IS USM, 1/4000 f/4, iso 200, tripod. Torrile, Italy.

This is one of my favorite photos, it captures the action and the iteration between the two birds. It is also one of my most post-processed photos: I've spent more than two hours with Photoshop to get the final image. I don't consider it an example of my standard workflow - it was an exception, a good image that could be "saved" only with heavy retouches during post processing - but it show what you can do (when it is necessary) with good Photoshop techniques. The "ethic" of such processing is a matter of opinions - some will consider it a "digital creation", other a real photo; personally, I still consider it a "photo", since the subject, the behavior and the environment had not been altered.

I was into my favorite blind of Torrile in a warm evening of August, with my beloved 600 f/4 IS and the 350D (one of my latest trips with the little Canon - a couple of weeks after I bought the 20D). It was a lucky day - there were more than twenty Cattle Egrets and every five/ten minutes there was a fight. The light was quite good, the subjects were in backlighting but the contrast was not excessive. Since I was photographing a white subject against a dark background with Evaluative Metering, I set the exposure compensation on -1, to preserve the highlights. At ISO 200 and f/4, there was enough light to get a shutter speed of 1/4000 - more than enough to freeze the motion. I focused on a Cattle Egret posed between the grasses, I locked the focus with the * button and I patiently waited the action. When another egret tried to steal the place to the first egret, I pressed the shutter release and I toke few shots: the 350D has a pretty slow FPS, just 3FPS, and a buffer of just 5 RAWs, but - spending the entire morning photographing these birds - I managed to get a shot that caught the action.

Cattle Egrets in fight - the RAW file of the previous photo, just converted and resized.

Unluckily, another egret flew in front of the lens right in the perfect instant. I had four shots of this sequence - the egret is in front of the two fighting egrets only in this photo, but into the other shots there is much less action. Cloning out the out of focus egret required some effort and a careful work with Photoshop.

After converting the RAW with ACR, I cropped the photo to the best composition. When I photograph birds in fight, I always leave some empty room all around, to avoid clipping the tip of a wing or a leg during the action - their movements are unpredictable, and it is easy to clip something if your composition is too tight. The high-resolution sensor of the 350D and many other recent digital cameras allows to crop the photo to the perfect composition during post processing, while maintaining enough detail even for large prints, even if you crop out 40-50% of the image.

On the right: the previous frame of the sequence. From this photo, it has been possible to reconstruct the detail hidden by the out of focus heron in the main photo.

Then, after the cropping for composition, the biggest problem. How to eliminate the large out of focus bird, while maintaining a natural look? If I've had only this shot, it would have been nearly impossible. But, since it was a sequence, it has been possible to "reconstruct" the detail from the previous frame, where the bird had already disappeared from the photo. I opened the previous photo with the same settings of ACR and I copied it into a new layer, above the main photo. Using the layer mask, I copied the detail that was covered by the bird - it was not an easy task, to get a natural result, even at the maximum magnification, I had to pay a lot of attention to the blending. Removing the two herons into background was much easier, since they didn't hide any significant detail.

After the cloning work, I processed this image as each one of my other photos. I warmed up a little the colors, increasing the percentage of yellow and red with Color Balance (this is a personal taste - I like warm colors, and I often give a slightly warm tone to the photos). I increased the contrast with Levels, paying much attention to the whites (it is important to maintain the detail even into the brightest areas) and I did some selective adjustments to "give more life" to the eyes. Finally, I increased the saturation to get more intense and vivid colors.

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