Oriole+Repost

I have the same problem with yellows, reds, and oranges. I am thinking of turning down the saturation levels, in-camera. I think that it is pretty cool how the bird has that caterpiller stretched out between his feet like that!

Steve,

It is very interesting to see the caterpillar between the Oriole's feet and the bill open as it is. I think the lighting was an issue with the yellow/orange areas as some of them are out of gamut. You could try pulling the saturation and/or luminance of the yellows & oranges in RAW and see if that brings out more detail in those areas. Sharpness looks good to me.

I find this an interesting image because of the action & behavior.

Excellent, Steve. Wonderful behavior shot. Did you check the individual color channels in ACR? It wouldn't surprise me if the reds were saturated in some places, which would pull down the effective contrast, even if the other color channels weren't.

Neat behavior Steve - that's one caterpillar that isn't going to make an escape. I have the same problems with the bright colors of the male Bullock's Oriole in less than ideal light.

cool shot, Steve. I like the caterpillar and behavior. I agree that you might be able to pull a little more detail out of the oranges by desaturating the orange channel in ACR.

Steve:
Neat behavioral shot and I think you have received some good suggestions about the yellows and oranges.

Thank you all for your fine comments. In response to them, using Photoshop, I’ve lowered the saturation for only the orange/yellow breast of the bird. There were a few spots that were close to being saturated (saturation values (G) of 250 or so). So, lowering saturation does help and is certainly worth doing, but I can see that the quality of this image really is limited by the available light. I checked the question of exceeding the gamut posed by Mia. My understanding is that problem occurs when we take an image from a wide gamut color space to a narrower gamut color space. The raw image was captured with the 7D set for the Adobe RGB workspace (known to have a wide gamut). [Also, the 7D was set for no additional saturation to be applied to the image.] I'm far from being expert on color spaces. However, Lightroom also uses a very wide gamut workspace and Photoshop was set at Prophoto RGB (again a very wide gamut workspace). The posted image was saved as a sRGB jpeg. Even the image in Lightroom shows lack of detail similar to the posted image. So, I don’t think that gamut was an issue here. Finally, from your comments, it’s nice to know that sharpness is not the issue anyway....for a change!