The rough mask The bear showing the Luminosity mask that was created for the bear Once that was done I activated the Luma Mask and created a mask that outlined the bear and bird based on the luminosity differences between the subject and background. Then I took a brush and created a mask for the bear. So I used 2 different layers.Ī layer for the bear and a layer for the bird. The image was improving but I wanted to adjust the bird and bear to stand out more. I had one last step that needed to be done and that was lightening the bear and bird. I didn’t use the clarity slider and instead relied on the new NEW Dehaze tool to help cut through the fog like atmosphere that we were experiencing. This helped open up the water just a bit. Using the high dynamic range tool I recovered a bit in the highlight by pushing the slider to the left and lighter some shadow areas by pushing the shadow slider to the right. Then I added just a touch of contrast and saturation. I adjusted the White Balance to make the image slightly warmer. I left this image uncrossed as the whole image was telling the story of not only the bird and her but of the environment. Typically at this point, I would crop the image for the subject. The results are obvious below as shown in the before and after screen capture from Capture One. By remapping the levels I was able to bring the image around to a point where I could start my adjustments. As you can see the Histogram was centered so the was no real white or black in the image. This helped bring out the tones in the image. The first thing I did was to remap the levels of the image. So, I remapped it setting new white and black points as well as off-centering the midpoint a bit. Step 1 – Levels You can see the histogram shows the majority of the image data is center. I took the image into Capture One and worked my way through the various steps. I had an exposure compensation of +.7 activated to compensate for the bright scenes (see below). I was shooting that day with a Nikon D7100 with an 80-400mm lens. It was an incredible day of photographing bears but this one image out of the thousand I too really stood out to me. The ship we were on was just driving with the ice and the polar bears would come and go emerging from the fog. I shot this image on a rather warm and thus foggy day. It was flat, dull, and needed some serious work The Image The original RAW file before working on it. Birds follow the bears and sustain themselves on the leftovers after a kill. The bear here is looking out to sea standing on the edge of an icepack (ice flow) looking to the horizon, like “where am I supposed to go?” I like the bird over him saying the same thing. Because the ice melts faster each year many bears don’t make it to the ice and thus are landlocked and have a difficult time finding food. Polar bears depend on the ice to hunt and sustain themselves. As the ice vanished and recedes more quickly and farther each year it puts the polar bear in distress. This to me is very symbolic of what is going on in the polar regions right now and especially the Svalbard area. I’ll start with one of my favorite images made all the way back in 2013 of a polar bear on the edge of an ice sheet and a bird flying directly over its head. I’ll on a regular basis take some of the images I have made through the years and recreate them using the latest version of Capture One and show where I started and where I needed and what was done along the way. I thought it would be fun to share with you how I made some of my favorite images. I’d like to call it Behind The Shot series.
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