Here is the basic RAW file straight from
opening it in Lightroom and saving it to JPG without doing any adjustments.

Why this was a "FUBER" in my books was that I had missed the framing and the GBH is too high and too far to the right for it to be a good shot.

Plus! The focus on his head is not perfect it's damn close but not as nice as I would like.

What follows is how I decided to bring this from FUBER to acceptably nice.





P.S. FUBER is also known as FUBAR or (F_____ Up Beyond All Repair)
So based on this definition - I guess it isnt really a FUBER like my out of focus dog was. Because we are going to fix it.

P.P.S. - Just because I'm showing you a way to fix this does not mean you should be lazy and not try and frame properly in the camera to begin with. This while not too hard is still a lot of work and if the background was not so regular we would have even more work ahead of us.

Before I brought this into Photoshop - I tweaked the settings to get more blue and more shadow detail in the image.

Looking at it again -- the untweaked version may actually be better and Not doing anything might have created less steps.

Hindsight is 20/20.

This step can just as easily be done in ACR or any other RAW reader.

Open the image in Photoshop next to continue on with our main step.

Lets move our bird into a better position in the frame.

Giving him somewhere to fly and also since it was suggested a little room behind him.

FILTER / OTHER / OFFSET is what you choose
and the settings I have here moved the subject where I wanted it.
It is important to have WRAP AROUND checked so that you get the effect you see here.

Now we have a bunch of seams that we need to clone away.

Working at 30% to start I chose a 300 pixel soft edged brush and using the clone tool at 63%, I sampled water under the bird and use short quick strokes to paint away the seams from left to right across the lines.

Then I worked From Right to Left to equalize the painting of the seams.

The top part needed more care so I switched to a 200 pixel brush and also started to work at 100% to make sure I did not get parts of the bird or the edges of the frame into the clone.

Here it is with all the cloning done. Not perfect but if you didn't know I cloned it you would not notice the variations in the Background.

The whole image seems a little off kilter and I am now going to straighten the image by using the same technique Tom covered here:
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/3062843#179323379

Then I used the Crop tool to re-frame the image.

Here it is just before cropping.

In this step - I have punched up the color density and set the Black Point using similar techniques to what Susan described.

If I set the white point it it pulls the color and feel way out of where I want it so I am leaving the white point as is.

This is another trick to add some contrast and punch to an image and is actually another form of sharpening, so make sure you do not use this step before all your cloning etc is done.

Optimally you would do this step last but I am not going to be doing any more editing to the image just color and tonal adjustments.

1. Duplicate the Background layer
2. Choose FILTER / OTHER / HIGH PASS
3. Depending on your image set it to somewhere between 1 and 3 pixels.





This is going to increase the definition in the GBH head and eye area reducing the OOF problem we have with the image. It also will bring out the definition in the wings and legs.

Set the Hi pass filter layer to Vivid Light to get the effect we want from it.

Here is what it looks like without the layer visible.

Here the layer is now visible and also set to a 75% opacity to reduce the effect to where I was happy with it.

Make a snapshot of your work flow if you want to be able to go back

and then Flatten your image.

Now I want to add a gradient to the image to increase contrast and pump up the water color even more. (I like blue).

I do not want this step to effect the shadow areas because darker would obliterate any detail we already have.

So the solution is to select the shadow areas quite simply by using the Color Range tool.

SELECT / COLOR RANGE

Use the eyedropper tool on the left to click on the shadow area and set the fuzziness to a setting that includes all of the areas you want to be masked from the next step. In this case 145 was a nice compromise.

There are more Steps on the next page!
http://photos.sherstone.com/gallery/3250002/2