swan

more from yesterday a swan this time c&c welcome

It looks soooo cold Sharon! They are so elegant, do you have more of the reflection in your original?

Nice capture Sharon. I would try to tone down the highlights, but other than that it great.

thanks Jan & Robin nope Jan this is the shot as is, he/she was at the waters edge so there wasn't much more of a reflection than what you see lol i did a little levels to bring out the water and that's about it, Robin can you suggest how to tone them down? i tried with levels but the white went grey and it didn't look good

Rough edit, using Elements - duplicated the image, and used levels to shift the midtones, bringing out more of the detail in the white feather area, then set that to multiply, and erased all the dark areas, just leaving the stronger detail in the whites... made a duplicate of the whole image, and burned in the water, then set that to 50% opacity, just to darken it down some... added a layer on top, set it to colour, and painted over the white of the swan, brought it to 50% opacity to clean up the blues in the shadow on the back, and generally provide an even tone to the swan without cancelling the tone that gives it form, on the neck... The water is a mater of personal taste, I guess, but if you flip between the two you'll see the detail regained in the highlights...

(There probably is more detail in there, but to do a proper job I'd need the original image, and a full photoshop so I can do channel seperations...)

thanks Stuart, it looks good, i had to laugh though, you've brought the water back to what it was in the original, normally at this time of night i wouldn't be able to send you the original image as i'm staying at my mums house and my pics are on my puter at home but strangely enough i put the swan and a couple of others on to a disc to work on them here so i can send it
p.s. normally i would shoot in RAW but this one i used auto and it's a jpeg hope that doesn't matter?

No, that's fine - send it to auxotic (at) gmail.com and I'll have a play around - there's probably still detail in one or more channels on the jpeg - just not as much as there usually is in a raw file...

Cheers,
Stuart