Very Busy Snowy Egrets

This is one of the shots I got at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery. This is such a fun place to visit this time of year – the birds are totally distracted and let you take really great photos. The above is of the beautiful Snowy Egrets – at this time only a few baby birds were seen, most were nest building and mating.

Here is a quick run-down of what was done to this image: In Lightroom Seim’s (see sidebar for website link) Super HDR X preset and Dave Delnea’s Develop Preset Forestwalks Look 03 were used before bringing photo into Photoshop. A little clean up and then a stamped layer was created (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) on top. Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Clarity was used to do an overall sharpening – this time I wanted a little more of an artsy look so my SJ Artsy with Highlights preset was used. (Settings: Clarity Dynamics Micro Contrast -0.86, Low Contrast -0.86, Medium Contrast 0.63, and High Contrast 0.94; Tone Level Black Level -0.19, Midtones -0.36, and White Level 0.19; HSL Filter Hue – no changes; Sat Orange 0.06, Yellow 0.63, Green 0.13, Blue 0.25 0.25, and Overall -0.45; and Lum Orange 0.36, Yellow -0.34, Green -0.42, Blue 0.61, Purple 0.11, Magenta 0.75, and Overall -0.27 – all other colors were 0.00.)  A layer mask was added and the birds were faces and beaks were painted out to maintain the sharpness since this preset smooths out colors. Nik Viveza 2 was used to draw focus to the babies and help remove a bit of yellow in the bird feathers. A Levels Adjustment layer was added to add back some contrast into the image. On another stamped layer, John Derry’s Varnish-Matte-Light layer style was used to apply a little painterly feel to the whole image. That was it. I love working on these bird images!…..Digital Lady Syd