Least Chipmunk, Zion NP

[larkvi]

[attachment=2814:attachment]

My intent here is to create an attractive wildlife portrait which highlights the chipmunk and its relationship to its environment. I would like to hear your opinion on how well I accomplished this and suggestions for how the image might be improved. All comments are welcome, but specifically tell me whether the chipmunk is central enough a focus/pops out from the background enough and your thoughts on the color and saturation of the image. The above image is 640px high. If you would like to see a larger image, here is one that is 1000px high:

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Best,

-Sean [www.larkvi.com]

[Lisa Nikodym]

A well-executed picture of a cute critter in action, which is all excellent, but I find it a bit frustrating to try to pick out the squirrel from the rest of the picture.  The background is too similar to the squirrel in tonality (i.e. a background much lighter or much darker than the squirrel would work better), and a little too much of it is obscured by the foliage.  The eye has to really search hard to find all parts of the squirrel, which is somewhat annoying.  It's too bad, because otherwise I'd really like it.  I understand that it can be difficult or impossible to find exactly the right surroundings when you're dealing with trying to capture a wild creature with a camera.  Maybe you could try selecting the green background and changing its brightness (one way or the other) in photoshop?

Lisa

[larkvi]

Maybe you could try selecting the green background and changing its brightness (one way or the other) in photoshop?
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I am having trouble doing this without compromising the effect of the dawn color and have not figured out a good technique for selecting the non-leaf part of the background to darken it selectively, but I am working on this.

[HickersonJasonC]

Sean, I think you've caught a nice moment here. A really cute shot. To separate the chipmunk from the foliage, try adding a vignette around the animal. You can do this by creating a new layer, setting mode to "overlay" and filling with 50% gray (all in the new layer dialog in PS). Then make a very loose selection around the chipmunk (I'd use the oval selection tool) and feather it quite a bit. Then just use the paint bucket tool with the foreground color set to black to darken the edges.

Here is my thirty second version (i added some more sharpening, too). You'll likely want to be a bit more subtle if you do this, but you get the idea. Just one option available to you . . .

[larkvi]

I have tried to incorporate the changes suggested here:

[attachment=2841:attachment]

Hopefully someone can tell me whether it 'pops' more for them.

-Sean [www.larkvi.com]

[HickersonJasonC]

Hopefully someone can tell me whether it 'pops' more for them.

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This is definitely an improvement. I'm not sure this image will ever be excellent because of the density of the foliage, but it is certainly better than the original.

[Richowens]

For your consideraton.


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Reworked in Lightroom to darken foliage and lighten the little bugger to make it stand out more. I also cropped out some of the foliage.

[iancl]

How about a slight vignette as well as darkening the green and yellow luminosity a little?

For your consideration. All done in Lightroom. If it were my own photo and I had a full size original, I might try to feather the bottom corner burn in a bit more using PS.[attachment=2861:attachment]