How To Edit Bird Photos Using Lightroom And Photoshop | Advanced Techniques From Start To Finish

Oh g'day everyone welcome to the channel for those that knew here I am a wildlife photographer based in Australia I'm in the fortunate position that I get to further out all the beautiful animals that live in this country I'm now sharing that with you on this channel so I'm going to record in the field when I'm out there photographing birds and kangaroos and whatnot and I'm also going to do some processing videos on the computer here and share that with you so share the process of how I actually go from start to finish so there'll be timestamps in the description below if you want to jump forward to Lightroom or Photoshop and you don't hear me rambling on so have a look at that because these videos will be fairly long so I've made a couple maybe you could do the same and we can go through this together before I get started I just thought I'd touch on a few things a few people have asked me whether I was impacted by the recent bush fires in Australia I'm very fortunate that this property wasn't impacted they kept the fires came to within about 60 kilometers of here we had a lot of smoke we had we have a push by evacuation plan for the property we have somewhere to go the town where we live as a centre set up for people to go and a lot of people did go there so south of us was impacted by by the fire you know my heart goes out to all the people that were impacted and of course the people that have died it's fairly tragic how it also goes out to all the animals of course that you know the habitat has been destroyed the impacts of that I'm not sure how big they are or how long it will take to recover I hope to in the future that to go up there and maybe have a look and take a few photos and take you along so you can see the devastation of the landscape up there so this week I'm going to process some white brown wood swallows if you watch my last video you would have seen we had a heap big flock of them turn up at the watering hole they do form flocks and they get very noisy great bird to watch you know they have a fair bit of character about them and there's a few different wood swallows in Australia this one is probably one of them common ones around here so let's jump onto the computer and have a look how I process these images okay so I've just opened up Lightroom I've got the images from the session and my last processing video I talked about how I rate images five stars being the best and one star being the least best and then I delete all the images that I don't want or don't have a star rating with this I actually only had a very short period of time to photograph these birds they were there and then they were gone so I only managed to get a few and just having a look here I've got eight images that I have starred and you'll quickly notice that for them or obviously of the bird and then four of them are off the perch and I'll explain why I've done that in a minute so we'll bring up this image here we've got the two birds it is a little bit dark and the raw image we've shot at at f/8 the big I was sitting in the blind hidden and I put up all the perches for the birds to land on I purposely put those perches up hoping the birds would land on those before they go to the water so birds use staging areas before going to water that's what I mean by that is off and start up feeling high-flying and generally they'll be in a tree or something like that and they'll work their way down to the water generally so if you can give them spots to land on before they get to the water you've got a chance that they'll land on those perches before making it to the water so in this case I've got a few perches leading towards the water and these woods waves were happily landing on those purchase that I've put up it's very fortunate when the male and the female so the males on the right who had stood more of the white brow and the female is on the left I was very fortunate that they both turn at the same time on the same perch and I was able to photograph them the biggest issue whenever you're photographing two or more birds on the same perch is the depth of field and getting them all on focus it can be very difficult because your depth of field is generally quite narrow and if you're close like I am as full-frame your depth of field is even now so I've got a real issue getting both these birds in focus and I was slightly aware of that I was using f8 possibly could have gone to f9 didn't have time so I was aware when I took these shots that these birds and them both of them might not be in focus and I had to check in this shot will quickly see if we go to 100% it's that the female is just out of focus the male is in focus but the female is just out of focus which is a bit of a shame but with some extra sharpening and we will be able to get some more detail out of that and make it a usable image as you saw in my last video so that's what we're looking at and you'll see that the perch is actually slightly out of focus because we've focused on the head of the bird of the male bird or in this area and the perch is obviously just behind that head and it's far enough away out of the depth of field that it's started to go out of focus I did actually just do all the processing of this one raw file for the previous video but I've just noticed that if we go and have a look at the the other photos and the series so you'll see this photo here there's actually a bird flying away you may wonder why I've got that image the reason I've selected this image is that the perch is a lot sharper so the focus is grab the perch and you can see how much sharper it is but the issue with the right hand shot is the male is now out of focus because it's obviously focused slightly in front of this male but the female is actually more unfocused in this shot than in this shot so we've got two images that one on the left has a sharp male head and chest and everything else is slightly soft and the image on the right is the perch is sharp and the females sharp so what we can actually do is we can use both of these images and merge them in Photoshop so that we get a sharp image all the way over I'll mention this last time it's up to you whether you use two exposures if you want purest or we you're not comfortable doing that it's entirely up to you I'm very open about how I process my images I've taken both these images it was obviously sharp to my eyes when I was looking at it and I've got this to him just so I can and we'll use both exposures okay so I had those four shots and I've optimally gone with the first leg up for their mail and the second shot I've got for the perch and the female and I will adjust both for those raw and then we'll export that and do that in Photoshop but what I would noticed and a skill that I use in the field is if you've taken an image anything oh gee it's a bit tight as in the birds have fallen the frame and you'd like more around the bird because you don't want to suffocate your image with the bird being enormous and you can't see anything else so we often like a bit of space around the bird but what you can do is if you've taken a shot and when we look at this it's not a lot not a lot at the top of the image is that almost you know it's very tight so sometimes if I'm in the field and I realize that and I have time I'll actually purposely photograph the perch and around it so that later and post I can actually use parts of these other images for the final one so you'll see here this image here of purposely focused on the person moves the camera and so I had a lot more space at the top of the image which I can use to add height above so be aware when you're out there sometimes some photographers I know will even photograph the perch obviously every time so that the perches sharp sometimes the perch won't be sharp but if you photograph just the perch maybe a bit higher if stop f9 you can then use that and the other emergent and join them together tightly up to you but that's one technique some photographers do use so if I open up this one here we go to the develop module and we want to develop this this image it's clearly too dark and we can tell by the histogram that we needed to push it to the right a little bit more so we can adjust the go to the right with that's looking pretty good to my eye I'm not going to crop and light him at this stage and I'll explain why is it's often easier to merge two images without cropping them because the birds will be the same size generally in both images so what I mean is if you crop two images differently and then try and overload overlay of them in Photoshop you'll struggle to match them up because the birds will be a different size so I don't do any cropping and Lightroom if I'm merging images ok the exposure looks pretty good I think the white balance is not too bad so I'll leave the white balance as it is as I mentioned before probably 5 points of contrast the highlights are pretty good I probably don't want to turn them down too much because the background will go a bit dark so looks fine to my eye shadows we can always lift those shadows a bit just to reveal a bit more detail and the bird the blacks turn those down a bit just to get in a bit more contrast and I will actually just do a quick adjustment brush on the eyebrow here so that it's not quite so bright so the highlights I've actually turned the highlights down to minus 13 exposure and then I just paint that over this brow and it will reduce how bright that is I can't see too many other bright images sorry I can't see any other bright parts that require the highlife to be turned down so I'm happy with that texture again I don't do a lot of that vibrancy usually turn that up a little bit taste it look at the whole image to see you know what it's looking like be careful with the vibrance and saturation you definitely don't want to overdo it I you know you can turn this all the way and it starts to look a little bit funny saturation has one of the has a bigger impact and it just starts to look wrong so just be aware of that saturation okay highlights for good and remove chromatic aberrations enable the profile Corrections don't do any highlight priority so I'm actually fairly happy with how that looks for the raw file I'll export that the trick now is if you want both images that you're blending in Photoshop to look the same you've got to apply the same broad justments to both images you can just right click on the image and go to develop settings and copy the settings and then you select the second image and you right click on it and develop settings and you paste the settings and it will put the same raw adjustments you made from the previous image to the next image so that when you overlay them they'll look the same one's not going to be darker or lighter than the other so that's how we make keep that continuity and I also need to do it to that this last image which is the perch one which I'm using the top part of this so I need to paste get the background the same so I now have these three images I'll export these three into another folder I have as Tiff's files and I call that I have a folder coordinates processing photos and that folder are the ones that I need to process in Photoshop okay say we're in Photoshop and I've imported the three files that we worked on a light room and to photoshop I've got the we've got the first main image I've got the second image which is the sharp perch and we've got the third image which is just the perch so this image here I could just process this on its own look it's fine as it is and that's what I did before but for this video I just want to show you how I would actually merge two exposures together so we're going to use this as the base layer and I would select this image I want to put this into on top of the other one so I can just move it I make sure this image is selected and over here on the right hand side in the layers I just drag the layer onto the top of the other image and then I can close this one so this here now has two layers it has the original image and so as the original image and then it has this image on top we need to align this image with the bottom image it's probably you can't I think there's a way in Photoshop you can do it to align the images but I find a little bit problematic at time so I just do it by eye I changed the opacity of this layer here to about 50% and then I could zoom in and I take the move tool and I just move it until it's about right and I actually use the keys on the keyboard to make the final adjustments and I just turn the layer on and off to get it to look looks pretty good and very close so you just use your eye that looks pretty good to me and then you change that a path city back to 100% and at a hundred percent we can see the difference between the two and the how sharp the perches and the feet are compared to the image underneath so what I want to do now and this is really a little bit complicated if you haven't used Photoshop before is we want to use masks the thing called a mask which reveals or hides the layers so in Photoshop we've got this layer this layer here so the sharp layer is currently sitting on top of that bottom layer and we want to reveal so if I put a mask on here and I change the blend I actually don't know what the technology is but I need to change this mask to hide which is control and I and it's gone black you can see how it's gone black it's currently hiding that layer so it's mastered its hiding we cannot see it so all we can see at the moment is the bottom layer now if I wanna reveal some of that sharp layer I need to select the paintbrush tool which is beyond the keyboard and then you have an opacity and you have the size so you can change the size with the brackets and you can see how it changes and then you simply just what they call paint I can reveal that layer by just holding down the left mouse button and just dragging and you can see how I am painting the that layer you can see how it's changing it and revealing that layer and so I can just do this to the parts that I want to be sharp which is obviously this entire bird so if you want to see what you have and you haven't done you can push the backspace key and we'll show you the areas that you have and haven't done so we just need to go around bird and do it and so all I'm doing here is revealing that top layer and I've just noticed that by actually using the brush tool I've got it too fairly soft on the edges of that tool and you can see it's actually you can see this it's just something you need to be aware of it's called the shoulder here and we don't want that so we want to hide this part which is actually being revealed so I need to change the color of the brush to black and just make sure that we're not revealing any of this by accident that's fine they changed the color of the brush back you just push X on the keyboard and do the rest of it and we'll reveal this sharp layer and you'll see we'll run into an issue I want to get rid of this great area here and there's a couple of ways you could do it the way that I do it is I basically just want to copy this area below up to here so standard way to do that a lot of people will just use the Healing Brush tool and that's fine but I actually prefer to copy this area here and so and move it and then there so I'll show you how I do it it might be easier okay so I've got this layer here I've created this additional layer I now want to move this layer up on your touch so I hit the move tool I simply drag it up a bit so it's now sitting above the other layer what I'm wanting to do is I'm wanting to paint this top layer onto the bottom layer so I need to hide this layer so we had a mask and I'd need to invert it so control eye it's now hidden now I just want to reveal the part this this I now want to reveal this top layer so at the brush tool make sure the color is white and you'll see it when I make the pasady a hundred percent at zero on the keyboard I just paint on here and it's revealing that layer above but it's you just revealing the part that I want because we've moved it up so it's revealing revealing what we want so I just use the paintbrush and we reveal just changing the size of the brush using the bracket keys and you want to make the brush smaller when you want to get into it here is harder here is okay alright so show you before and after so that was before and that was after and all we've done is moved that layer up and then revealed so basically all we've done is taken this part here and moved it up here and it's very very similar type of background and it works well and I do that a lot so I I'll often craft if I want to copy say this part of the image and put it here I'll just remove it and then reveal it using masks as mentioned masks are very powerful and it's bitly worth your time looking that up on YouTube and understanding how masks work alright so revealed that okay so now that I've got the image looking how I've merged those two layers it's looking good I can now process that it's come vyas to me that there's not enough space above the bird what I mean is it's a little bit it feels a little bit cramped above so you want a bit more space so we want to add some canvas to the top of this image and there's a couple of ways to do it but first we need to increase the canvas size so if you come up to image and then go canvas size we'll just make this six thousand pixels so make it too big and then we can crop later so click okay so we've added the canvas you can see above but now we don't want it white we will obviously want the top part to look very similar to this part and that's where that other layer where that other layer comes into play so I've still got an open hand so this is the background so we want to take the top part of this image and put it on this image so the way to do that is I need to drag or copy this this image as a layer on this one so I'll just drag it from here on to there and using the move tool or move it up to where we want it obviously that doesn't look like so we you need to we need to hide this layer and then reveal the part we want so to do that we click on this this layout we had a mask and then we need to invert that mask to hide this layer control eye so that layer is now hidden that we want to reveal that top part so we hit the brush tool and we got to make sure the brush tool is white because this mask is black so the white brush will reveal that layer so I need a bigger brush type make sure their passive is at 100% and I simply brush and I am revealing that layer that is hidden and it kind of magically adds this to the top and as you can see it looks fantastic we can't even tell that I've done that so that's looking good so I'll show you before and after that was before I painted on and that was after it's a very simple way just to add a little bit of canvas if it's if the background is roughly the same there are times you'll run into it's a little bit tricky for this example it works fine so now we need to crop it so I hit the crop tool the ratio is 2 by 3 which is the standard all I need 2 by 3 so we need to do the crop again cropping is something you'll get with experience I want these birds probably to be in the left 2/3 reasonably high sorry it's nice and centered and that's looking pretty good look yeah happy with that yep I'm happy with that so we've got the crop right we've got those three exposures now and you can see it probably only ended up using it a tiny bit here just to sliver at the top but anyway okay so we'll get started on making this summer final adjustment so alt ctrl shift and E creates a merge layer all those layers underneath I've noticed once when I was looking at this image a female she's actually got a tick I believe it's a tick on her bill and I'm not sure what this is so I'm a bit pedantic a lot of time when it comes to cleaning up faces of birds and whatnot so I want to remove that tick it's not that pleasant to look at so to do that I just get the poly lassoo tool for up here and I just do a selection around the tick and I'll hold down the shift key to make it another selection which is this white part on the bill doesn't have to be exact Photoshop has a really good job and you can come up here and go fill or content-aware fill content-aware fill was a lot more precise but the fill is just feel like it's just one less step and it generally does a pretty good job to undo the selections ctrl D and it hasn't I don't like this black area that it's selected so I'll just do it again edit fill and it's got rid of that it's done a fairly good job on here I don't really like this blight area so I'll just quickly get the Spot Healing Brush and I'll just get rid of a few of these white areas that do such a good job on again this is purely preference cleaning up birds and faces if you don't want to do it you don't have to do it I just like to do it it just makes it a little bit cleaner in my opinion looking pretty good so I'll show you before and after it's done a pretty good job on that time you'd be hard-pressed to tell watches ooh now that we have removed those okay so clean that up and now I want to add a little bit of contrast so to do that I've got an action and just makes it pop a little bit just as a little bit of contrast to it levels adjustment just gotta be careful when you do that because it often can blow out your whites so I can just quickly add a mask using the paintbrush tool got to make it black and I'm just going to hide the lighter areas that they don't have this contrast it had adjust to the brightest areas okay do a curves layer and I go up to the preset and I do linear contrast just like an s-curve and it just makes it a little bit brighter but it's a bit too much so I turn that down a little bit very very minor a lot of the time it's just little subtle changes that's I'm happy with that next I now need to merge these layers so ctrl alt shift and E next step is the sharpening so how I sharpen images is I do a high-pass filter and I'll show you how I do that but just looking at it the male is actually pretty pretty good it doesn't need a lot of sharpening added to it it's the female that has the issues so the females a little bit soft so I probably just want to apply the sharpening mani to the female and we can do that using a mask that what I will do is we will apply the Paso filter other I pass and the radius number here the higher that number the more sharpening that will be applied to there's a little bit too much and then I can use the opacity filter to reduce it to how I like it and you come over to this drop down here on the right hand side and pick overlay and you'll see the difference and the sharpening that's been applied it's quite drastic and it does an excellent job on that female but it's done too much on the male you can see the male has now gone crunchy and we don't want that so I just want to apply this to the female so to do that I need to create a mask I need to do a selection of the female first so I need to make sure that a layer with the birds is selected I come up to the left hand side quick selection tool and I just go around the female and the female which it has done so I don't really want the perch or the male so create a selection so now click back onto that high pass layer if I hit the mask tool it's now created a mask and just revealed the female so if I click on and off so as you can see big difference on the female on the sharpening but it hasn't applied any to the male at all so that mask is just applied to the female let's say I just want a little bit a little bit of sharpening added to the male's face I can just grab the paintbrush tool make sure that it's white to reveal so remember we've got that that sharp layer underneath that were hiding and I can reveal it but I don't want to reveal 100% I'd only go to 100% sharpening of that layer so I can change the opacity so change the opacity here to say 20 percent and when I brush this on it's revealing 20 percent of that layer so it actually it's only reduced so easy way to think of it it's 20 percent shopping instead of a hundred so now if I paint that on it's just doing 20% which you know is about right I don't to get too much let's have a look it's done it up a little bit just enough so I'm happy with that so if we look at the before and after yep happy with that okay I think that's pretty good so I'm pretty happy with how that image is looking now I've done a few little adjustments it's sharp everything that's looking and good now there's no noise reduction because of how bright the background is there's no noise whatsoever and though I saw was wasn't too high I'll show you the before and after so you can see so I'll just copy the bottom layer that we started with and I'll drag it to the top so we can have a look so that was the original image and that is the processed image so the original image had the soft bit soft female and the soft perch and if you remember and the final one we obviously we blended those two layers and we've got the sharp on now instead so it's actually quite a big difference in the before and after adding that sharp so that's what we've done yeah I guess we can have a discussion below if you want on the on whether you would use two exposures and whether you think that's you know some people may say it's cheating ultimately you know I've taken both images they're available to me and it was pretty through the camera limitation of the depth of field which has prevented me from getting the entire image sharp so by having the two versions I can create what I was looking at with my own eyes again it's entirely up to you whether you do it or not I'm happy to do it I'm always open and I will say what I've done so you know when you're in the field if you up to this just remember to take you know multiple images over time sometimes even if you've got two birds sometimes I've focused on the left bird and the right bird knowing that I may have to merge those later if they're not both sharp so that's just something to think about when you're photographing multiple birds on the one perch what other tips so yeah thank you very much for sticking with it I know it's long and I do appreciate the feedback and comments if you want to continue to see this sort of content be sure to subscribe at that little bowel if you want to be notified when I put up new videos I really do appreciate the support thanks for watching and see you on the next one thank you [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 37,444

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, wildlife photography, nature photography, image processing, lightroom, photoshop, How to edit Bird Photography, Post processing, Editing, Bird photo editing in photoshop, Bird photo editing in lightroom, wildlife photography tips, bird photography tutorial, editing bird photos, processing bird photos, adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop, wildlife editing

Id: rdjKRPO-Upc

Length: 33min 42sec (2022 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020