Playing with darkness and light in Lightroom.

Everything was abuzz on the waterfront this morning. Birds and insects, fowl and fish. If it could move or make noise, it was doing it. I took some sunrise sky shots of cloud cover then hit the mud trail for bird and duck watching.

The picture below was a quick snap of a bird as he perched on a broken reed over the water. The settings were ƒ/6.3, 1/200 sec. at 100 ISO, 250mm lens strolled all the way out with the auto focus turned off.




When I got the image uploaded on the computer it was plain to see that it was really dark. I had been taking most of the shots with the morning sun behind me or right out on the water. The shaded back lit underbrush was a quick reaction picture. But I still really liked the feel of the photo.

Once in Lightroom, I cropped a bit to get rid of the out of focus leaves in the foreground. Then I edged the the exposure down some to get rid of the coloring on the wing to make it a true silhouette. After that I used the recovery function to give substance to the background. Next I added +20 to the clarity to give the water ripples and then brought up the vibrancy to pop the green on the leaves and to give the water some hue. Less than two minutes and it's a totally different picture.