Lens shortcoming or pollutants?

[MN Shutterbug]

I have noticed, most recently yesterday, that when I shoot a bird a long ways off on an overcast day, I just don't get the sharpness like I do on brighter days. Would this have to do more with the lack of contrast in the dim light or, because of the distance, the pollutants in the air?

I cropped out at least 2/3 of this picture. I was using a tripod at 1/200 sec. and the exposure was dead on - to the right with no blown highlights. It's not bad, but it just doesn't have the "pop". I have no doubt that if the skies were clear, it would have turned out much better.

[mmeyer]

Mike, it looks plenty sharp to me, I would say it's probably more of a lighting issue. With the cloud cover it just looks a little flat. Maybe if you put a Better Beamer on your flash that would add some pop. I don't know, I've never used one but it would seem to make sense.

Nice shot either way.

[MN Shutterbug]

Thanks, Mike.

I've tried the flash with Better Beamer, and found it a pain in the neck. A good share of my photography is from a car or blind, and neither works well with that setup. I'm just not a serious enough photog to want to go thru the annoyance of attaching the flash bracket, flash and then flash extender, in the hopes it will help one shot during the rare occasion that I'm in a position to use the setup.

[Dbl]

I'm with MM, flat lighting will cause flatter looking colors. Just a few simple PP steps will get you back to more pop.

[MN Shutterbug]

Dan, if you have time, perform your magic and see what you can do with it. I tried everything, and this is the best I could come up with. I opened the shadows, adjusted the levels, lightened the eye, added a litte saturation and sharpened with USM just shy to the point of causing halos.

Thanks.

[Steve Foss]

X, you might post a jpg version of the undoctored original here and let various people pull it onto their desktops, do what they will, and repost it with their workflow steps. Or not.

[MN Shutterbug]

Not. I no longer have the original. I could attempt to recover it from the deleted card, but that's too time consuming. It was a good idea though. Next time, I'll hang onto the original jpeg.

[mmeyer]

Shame on you! Don't you keep an original and the pp'd file always? You should you know.

[Steve Foss]

Quick and dirty 45 seconds in photoshop. Better? Not better? It's an individual decision. First I applied shadows/highlights to the whole image, lightening shadows 50 percent but leaving highlights untouched. Then I dropped mid-range levels and brought up shadow levels to increase the feel of contrast without touching highlights. Then I desaturated blues and cyans so the snow lost it's blue/gray cast, also saturating reds and yellows. Killing blues/cyans and intensifying yellows/reds also warmed up the image. That was it. Took me longer to type it than to do it.

X, you seriously dumped the original captures?

[MN Shutterbug]

If it's a real killer shot, I will save the RAW file. If not, I'll save a pp'd file as a .tif and then resize to 800 X ??? and save that one as a .jpg. Unless I've really messed up, I can always go back and rework the tif.

[Steve Foss]

If it's a real killer shot, I will save the RAW file. If not, I'll save a pp'd file as a .tif and then resize to 800 X ??? and save that one as a .jpg. Unless I've really messed up, I can always go back and rework the tif.

I understand your thinking, but we all gain knowledge as time goes on, and if we do several steps in pp before saving as a tiff and then kill the original raw, we'll never be able to go back to the actual original and apply what we've learned.

There are several images from 2004-2006 of mine that I thought were not good enough but have gone back and "saved" because of what I've learned in pp over the last couple of years (not to mention been able to subtly improve because of increased sophistication in software). Had I already made my earlier mistakes in pp and kept only the saved tiffs, I would not have been able to fix them up very well.

Just my persective, buddy.

[finnbay]

Just 30 seconds worth of curves and levels. I'm sure a little more time and it could pop a little more.

and threw just a little sharpening into it, looking at it now it probably did not need that.

[MN Shutterbug]

Thanks, Steve. Your version is definitely brighter. I see now that I should have opened the shadows more. I couldn't quite follow your instructions for levels, so I used the curves adjustments instead. I've never put much thought into saturation, but see now that saturating or desaturating different colors, can make quite a difference.

Here is my final version.

[MN Shutterbug]

Ken, thanks for your version too. We cross posted here.

[MARINERMAGNUM]

I'm not sure what I did.

I usually get [PoorWordUsage]'d when I PP because I won't take the time to learn all the tricks.

I guess I did make it smaller!

[MN Shutterbug]

Thanks, guys. This has been a learning experience. We'll have to do this again someday.

[DeeDee]

Ya know its really great how you guys not only give great advice but step by step on what you have done.