Sometimes you can turn a "just OK" photo into something much better.

One of my most popular photos is a portrait of a preening Great Egret. But the final product is quite different from the original image.

I think most photographers have a ‘gut feeling’ when they press the shutter release that they’ve captured something interesting, but sometimes the final product can be very disappointing. I was photographing this preening Great Egret when the head position, curve of the neck and the ruffled feathers really caught my eye. I had only one shot before the egret changed positions, and the outcome was extremely underwhelming. Bird off center, super boring background, blah color…ugh.

I wondered if converting to black and white would make a difference. In Photoshop, I could have chosen Image:Mode:Grayscale but the photo would be flat and lacking much interest. Instead I chose Image:Adjustments:Black and White which give me a whole range of options for adjusting the colors and creating the values a good BW photo needs.

Since the background had a good amount of red in it, I pulled the Red slider as far to the left as it would go, resulting in a darker background. But the yellow beak also had a lot of red in it and it darkened too much, so I needed to push the yellow slider to the right to lighten the values. A few nudges of the Cyans slider to the left helped define some of the shadows in the feathers which added some depth of form. Hmmm, still a little flat.

I then adjusted the Values by darkening the shadows, and a slight lightening of the midtones and highlights to make the Egret pop a little more.

There was still too much boring background so I tried a vertical rather than horizontal crop and…finally…that’s it! A little tweak of the contrast and values, and it was done. This photo reminds me of the black and white glamour photos of the 1930s through the 1950s. What do you think? Id love to hear your thoughts.

You can purchase a print of this photo here. Please order by December 7 for Christmas delivery.

Disclaimer: I’m not highly proficient in Photoshop, but I know enough to get by. There may be other programs that can achieve the same result, but this is what I know. This is most likely the only ‘technique’ post I’ll ever do, but I wanted to illustrate how a boring photo can be converted into something much better than the original with a little experimentation in photo editing. I hope you enjoyed it.

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