Raw conversion challenge

Thanks for the comments on my first attempt.

Phil, yours is really great, what sort of sharpening did you do to get that much detail out of the feathers?

Here's my second attempt. I cleaned up the layer masks, lightened some of the feathers, and added some high pass sharpening. Hopefully the crop on this one is better too.

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I started out with the standard 300/0.3/0 with unsharp mask, and I might have slightly tweaked it from there, but because raising the exposure +2 in ACR caused a bunch of noise, I ran it through noise ninja with no sharpening. This is not my typical workflow, as I usually apply unsharp mask in Noise Ninja which seems to work best.

I am really not good with layer masks at all, and going +2 on the exposure virtually eliminated the sky, so I just put the sky layer behind, selected all the white areas in the first exposure and deleted them so the sky would show through.

Chap, the transitition between your layers looks much cleaner than what I did. Can you tell me how you did the layer masks?

BTW, thanks for the feedback everyone. Just about every technique I used was learned right here on P.O.T.N., so I guess I just spend way too much time on the forums (I think my boss will attest to that).

Phil,

My layer stack has the sky layer as the background and the bird on top. To do the layer mask I started out by duplicating the sky layer, which has the bird nearly black to begin with, and using the threshold command to roughly make the bird black and the sky white. I copied this into the layer mask for the bird layer and deleted the temporary layer. Then I zoomed in to 200% or 300% and used the paintbrush tool with a small soft brush to clean the edges. A graphics tablet is really a necessity for this sort of thing (I use the cheapest Wacom model). One of the things I learned recently that really speeds up the process is that the [and] keys will bump the brush size smaller and larger by a small amount. You get the best results by taking it slow and working on one piece at a time. I completely redid the masks for the second version I posted because with the closer crop the original ones really looked bad. I'd guess it took about 20 minutes or so to get the mask just right.

chap

Just seen this and wow to some the covertions they look great.
Rob.