Laughing Kookaburra (best viewed larger)

Thanks for looking.

 

Cheers

 

Mike

Although this shot is well captured, I feel your PP has given it a feeling of unreality. It's difficult for me to put this into words, so please bare with me. It has a soft quality that seems to drawn way from the sharpness that is obviously there. It also seems to be maybe a little over-saturated. It's a well done shot that you might have taken just a bit too far in post processing.

Thanks for your well thought out and constructive comment.

 

I can see where you are coming from; the image definitely has an overall softness.

 

I was trying for a painterly feel without resorting to the use of artistic filters. Most of the post processing has gone into isolating the young bird by blurring the background. The softness in the bird itself is a result of blending a sharpened layer with a Gaussian blurred layer to place the detail on a coloured base. From memory I have not tweaked the saturation very much; the background already had strong colours from a mixture of blue sky and eucalyptus leaves.

 

Thanks again for your useful observations.

 

All the best

 

Mike

 

Very beautiful work! I like the softness in this image. Best wishes

When I first saw the thumbnail of this it looked like the whole image was excessively blurred, but once I had actually viewed it I can see the detail very clearly and it looks impressive. My personal preference would have been a slightly darker background, I think it's more the brightness than the blurring that distracts, especially in the small version. Having said that, I'd hang it on my wall