Post processing attempt - Butterfly

Kristoph · 24 Jun 2007 at 22:43

Firstly, this is one of my Dads shots. No credit to me for this - his shot.
I'm only using them to learn the photoshop side of things due to not having a decent camera personally. (Only my phone! - Which is capable of this).

Not sure if I've ruined it, but I tried to bring the colours of the butterfly out a bit more and keep the background from overpowering the butterfly.

I altered the levels, curves, burnt, sharpened and dodged. I personally prefer the processed one, but I might be biased!

Here's the original:

Here is the processed one:

EDIT- I looked at both images, and put together the plus points of each. This is slightly better than the 1st processed one in my opinion.

Any advice or crit is welcome.

TheAlex · 24 Jun 2007 at 22:50

I definitely think the 1st one is too bright, it looks like the butterfly is super-imposed onto the background. The new version is still perhaps a bit over-done? That bright bit of grass at the top is distracting. It is the best of the three.

BUFF · 24 Jun 2007 at 23:11

If you know what a Peacock butterfly looks like in real life then the colours in the processed one are obviously wrong.
Can't say that I'm fond of the tunnel effect either & you've burnt out the top middle blade of grass.

Kristoph · 24 Jun 2007 at 23:29

BUFF said:
If you know what a Peacock butterfly looks like in real life then the colours in the processed one are obviously wrong.
Can't say that I'm fond of the tunnel effect either & you've burnt out the top middle blade of grass.

DB_SamX · 25 Jun 2007 at 00:24

From a newb's pov, i prefer the orginal - looks far more natural and the processed one look odd, maybe that is just compression jaggies and such.

a1ex2001 · 25 Jun 2007 at 10:43

I think your main problem here is that the origional looks like it has already been over processed, as has already been said the butterfly looks super imposed over the back ground, I think you need to start with a different picture preferably one you have taken your self. The aim with post processing should be to make the picture look as much like the origional scene as possible, with a few imporvments like removing distracting detail. Which you can't do unless you were there.

(obviously the above ignores effects processing like HDR which generally look nothing like the origional scene unless sone very subtly)