Hummingbird+Repost

And now, the bird alone. Now the image is only 1.7 MP. Detail still looks good to me.

All comments welcome

Hi Steve, Nice pose and composition. The hummer seems to have a strange blue cast.

Peter

You're right, Peter! Thank you. I never noticed that. I adjusted the white balance a bit. Here's another try at it. (it is also a test of my aging color vision!) I hope this fixes it!

Nice HB shot, but it still has a color cast, on my monitor it is more green than blue.

I prefer the bird with the flower in this case Steve. There's still a strange cast to the repost although not as strong as the original post.

O.K., once more with feeling....my wife assures me that the color cast is now gone........So, at least one person agrees with me...

Steve: Nice capture of the hummer. Sounds like you had a lot of time with this little guy and you took advantage of it. Still a color cast (even after the second repost) to my eyes. Here's a version of the original with an attempt at removing all of the color cast. It may have gone too far, but I'm not sure what the background may have looked like.

Hope you don't mind my attempt at a color correction.

PS... Not wild about what this did to your red flower. I was just looking at the bird.

Very cool, Steve. As an ex-flora sort of guy, I think I prefer the one with the flower, though it certainly distracts from the hummingbird. I think the dark bg makes the flash a bit obvious-you may have to start playing with multi-flash setups From the looks of it, I'd guess you just applied noise reduction to the bg. There seems to be quite a bit in the wings. Since they're blurred, you might try doing some on them as well.

Keith did the photo justice. It certainly had a green/blue cast to it that was distracting. Curious to know what you had WB set to? Auto?

Thank you, everyone. Special thanks to Keith Bauer for taking the time to tackle the color cast. I too like his result. I don't have much time to make this comment. I can elaborate later if any of you have any further questions. This is a case where my error in post processing caused a lot of trouble. In trying to reduce the dominance of the bright red flower in the image I managed to lower the saturation on red in the image everywhere. The resulting color cast was not very evident to me because of the very dark background occupying most of the image (plus my limited vision!). The raw original does not show the color cast. Also, it doesn't show the noise in the wing that Dennis pointed out. Those were my "improvements" to the raw image! I'll rework this image eventually. However, I think I'll spend some time on another image of this same bird and post it tomorrow. Hopefully, it will be better! Thank you again, everyone. This whole thing has shore been a lesson to me! (ref: "Bad Man's Blunder").

color cast aside, a nice hummingbird shot. I agree that the flower is a little overpowering, but also feel that the close crop is a little too tight--probably not too hard to paint in some extra bg/clone out the flower to give it a little more room. I agree about removing the noise from the wings.

Ya, for me it looks very green too. It doesn't bother me at all though... I love the composition and the pose of the bird. It contrasts really nice with the colorful flower. Killer shot Steve!!

Thank you so much for the additional comments. Too bad I made that error in processing because I agree that the shot has so many nice qualities. I am going to have another try at processing this one....based on the reception the new image of this hummer that I will post tonight receives.

Well, the second hummer image was well received. So, just for the record, here is the reprocessed version of this image.