How did I do that? The Heron photo transformation!

Last weeks’ blog post titled “Inspired by Herons” was a popular one! So much so that I thought this week I’d share a bit more about the transformation of original photo to create the final photo.

Read on to hear how I approached taking such a, well, dismal looking photo and used it to create a photo that I’m super proud of and that brings a big smile to my face!

The original image

As I mentioned last week, I spent about 2 hours watching the Herons in their natural rookery habitat. My pre-owned 600 mm lens (a long, fixed lens) was new to me and I was experimenting with it. Even at that long length, you can see how far away the Herons were from me in the original photo.

Even though they were far away, I could see the birds clearly enough to be excited and in awe of their majestic forms as they flew around the rookery and landed in their nests. I could also feel the sense of ‘family’ of the birds in each nest. It was magical!

Why I chose this photo to work with

This photo stood out to me because of the relationship that it shows between the birds. To me, this is a family photo where one bird is watching the nest and the other is flying into the nest from possibly hunting for food or maybe taking a flying break.  I love the way the beaks are crossed at just that moment before the bird on the right landed in the nest. What a moment to capture!

Editing

Once I decided on this photo, I knew I had a lot of work to do.  Initial editing was done in Adobe Lightroom.  I cropped it to my favorite square crop. I adjusted the brightness, colors, sharpness, texture, and highlighted the faces and the wonderful egg that is barely visible in the nest. 

Because the sky was a dull blue, I decided to add some clouds. I popped over to Photoshop and used a cloud brush to scatter some clouds in the background. The result was a bright partly cloudy looking sky. If I were processing this photo today, I could probably use Photoshop to easily mask the sky out and insert a real sky photo in the background instead. Technology changes so fast and tends to make our tasks easier over time. That is definitely true with photo editing. And it's a good reason to keep your old 'maybe someday' photos for future editing - the tools get better all the time!

Next, the image was large but the birds only take up a small portion of the image.  My crop resulted in a very small image. The crop cut out at least 70% of the pixels. The resolution for a jpg would be so poor it would not be large enough to even share without it being blurry.

Luckily, there are software programs that will enlarge photos that have been super cropped. My favorite is by Topaz Labs and it is called Gigapixel7.

This software took my small cropped file and using parameters that I set, created a jpeg file that was 4 times larger in resolution. It uses AI to help enlarge the photo. This does not at all mean my photo is now AI generated. It just means it was able to expand the photo by using AI to correctly fill in the pixels in a larger resolution file that looks exactly like my original photo.

The resulting larger photo is now sharp and ready to be shared and printed.

Voila! I had my new image showcasing exactly what I see in that photo – “Heron Love”. And that is the story of this image.

Wrapping up

If you’d like to learn more about how I transform my photos, send me an email and let me know. As a small business owner of a creative business, I’m always wondering how I can share my skills in various levels of detail to help people create their own art. What would you like to create and how can I help with that?

Bye for now 😎,

Natalie

P.S. My online course "Take Your Best Shot: Great Photos Made Simple" will be re-opening for enrollment this fall! Sign up for the waiting list (and my email list) to hear more about it!