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Tui in Flax Bush


Tui in Flax Bush Prints
(c) John Corney 2011
 Here is what I think is a great example of the power of the "digital darkroom".

While reviewing some photos I took while in New Zealand recently, I almost went passed the photo below thinking I couldn't make much of it. However since the bird, a New Zealand "tui" seemed to be reasonably sharp, I thought I'd take a look and see what I could do.

I found most of the background distracting, and wanted to get the focus on the bird, so cropped it greatly in Lightroom and then went to work with it in Photoshop.

Because of the imperfections in the image that you are going to see when you crop the image this much, I decided the only way to go was to hide the imperfections with art, so to speak. So in other words I set out to smooth the pixels which were quite jagged.

Above is the artwork that I came up with. I have to say it was pretty exciting and fun to be able to realize something like the image above from the one below.

Tui in Flax Bush - Before Version
See the two images side-by-side in my before and after gallery.

Listen to the wonderful bird song of the New Zealand tui here at the NZ Department of Conservation website

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