This guy is standing on a jetty fishing while I was zinging by on a boat trying to get his picture. Decided to try out a lot of new things on this one – some worked and some did not. It was not the greatest image since the boat was moving when it was taken and it is a jpg. Problems to start with, but I love the image so had to deal with it. Now that Photoshop and Lightroom/ACR have added so many good options, it really helped with this image. Tried out the New Color and Vibrance Adjustment Layer and the Clarity and Dehaze Adjustment Layer. Beta just came out with an new Light Adjustment Layer which contains the sliders from Lightroom’s Basic section – worked really well. Biggest issue was getting the fishing lines to show up. Had to use a Levels Adjustment on a copy of the original darkened way down to see them, then reproduce them as best I could on a New Layer using a hard Brush at 1 px, then click, and then ALT click at the end – to create with black color. These had to be reproduced several times. Overall I think it has the feel I wanted……Digital Lady Syd

Tried out a new tutorial on this fabulous Yellow-Billed Stork image at the Jacksonville Zoo. He is hard to miss if you get into their bird section! Most of this image was post-processed using a very short YouTube tutorial called The Ultimate Masking Trick to Recreate Lighting Realistically in Camera Raw by Easy Photoshop. I did start in Lightroom to do some basic steps like selecting the Adaptive: Subject: Warm Pop preset, the Profile (using Camera Standard v4 for Nikon camera), setting Sharpening to 0, checking Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections, and lastly running Denoise and adjusting the slider amount. In Photoshop Topaz Sharpen AI was applied, then duplicated this layer and ran Gaussian Blur (Radius 2.5) on the whole layer. For layer selected what should not be blurred by using Object Selection and adding the foreground plants using the Selection tool for one big selection of bird and foreground areas. By adding a layer mask to the blurred image layer, the part not to be blurred was created. Next a stamped layer was created and turned into a Smart Object. Now the image was ready for the tutorial so the Camera Raw Filter was opened. This is where most of the lighting effect took place using the Masking section. It was actually pretty easy if you follow the tutorial steps. I really like the very nice soft warm effect on the bird neck and the background. Could not have done this before this year…… Digital Lady Syd