Help needed on PP

A little too saturated on the two and maybe a little over-sharpened on the hummer, but nice capture of the little guy.

I find the masking function in LR very helpful when sharpening. In this instance, it can prevent the oversharpening of the background (I think the hummer is ok)

Alex

The third bird is a Cardinal. Thats the male, the female is more brown than red. Lot of them here, see some (probable the same one) every day, year round. Posting that picture was a mistake on my part, not a good shot. This camera shots only JPEG and I'm still trying to get used to it. Not shooting RAW was one of the things I had to give up to get the big zoom. These were all shot at 800mm and at that range its hard to find birds in the VF and I still havent found out how to get them to pose for me. Thanks for the comments.

Thanks for the comments, Julie. I'll post some SOOC when I get my gallery going

Hi sloaner. With respect to the other replyers, it is very difficult to judge images on the web because everyone's screen has different settings. What looks ok on your screen could appear too dark or too light etc on someone else's screen. The only way to truly judge images is via their prints.

But I can try to help regarding the technical aspect of your images. Since you asked for a critique, I have taken the liberty (I hope you don't mind) of downloading your second image and look at it Elements.

The first thing I see is that the black point is set too high and hence the lower contrast in your image. I have lowered the black point for each of the rgb channels by adjusting the black point slider in a Levels Adjustment layer. The improvement in the image's tonal range is immediately obvious.

The best way to demonstrate what I mean is to upload (see below) the edited image and the its histogram.

With further edits and fine-tuning the image could be improved even more.

If you have further questions, post back and I will try to help.

ok, I didn't realise. But it's difficult and nearly impossible to give meaningful critiques of web images unless you look at the actual data because the image will appear slightly differently on every screen, especially if screens are uncalibrated.  

eg..I read alexr suggests darkening the highlights but when I look at the rgb values of the bird's breast region in sloaner's posted image I see they are virtually all 255,255,255 (pure white) and so darkening the highlights will have little, if any, effect at all and certainly won't restore any detail.  Hopefully the original photo, before any PP, has more detail.

sloaner: if you have the original SOOC photo and if you would like to post it I or someone else might be able to advise on PP it.

Sloaner - you have jumped into photographing some difficult subjects. They just won't sit still when you ask...

As for your photos, I'm in the camp of "less is more." I'm not a fan of super saturated- especially for nature photos. Soft looks better to me.

I'm not much of a photographer, but I am usually pretty happy with what my point and shoot captures in jpg. Your problem may actually be more about zoom than jpg. I have my camera set so zoom doesn't go digital.