I took this leopard in the Serengeti, in the middle of the day — the light wasn’t great. I’m a beginner and I’d love some pointers, especially on editing: what retouches would you make, and how could I have shot it better in the first place?
I’m writing up the whole build-your-own-safari trip here → https://diysafari.club/leopard/
Thanks!
I don’t see that this requires any edits at all, really. There are no technical deficiencies with the photograph. Everything that needs to be in focus is in focus. The composition does a good job of conveying the scale of the tree against the cat, and provides context for the nap in question. It avoids being another subject-spang-in-the-middle photo.
So, what are you trying to accomplish with the final result? If it is to imitate the hyperartificial punchy look of the magazine photographs you see, wind up the contrast and saturation a bunch, and either use your channel mixer or lasso mask tools or what have to you to bring down the brightness of the sky in the background to make it bluer. If you really wanted to chase trends, the internet seems to think you should have used an ND filter and taken this at ƒ/0.8 or whatever to ensure that all objects more than one molecule behind the cat wound up wildly out of focus with exaggerated bokeh.
But personally I wouldn’t bother. The world is already full of punters cranking out fake images. Why go through the trouble to make a genuine image look more fake?
If needs must, here’s what I did with it:
This was:
- Brightness -5
- Contrast +10
- Global Saturation +10
- Cyan Pseudochannel Lightness -15
- Cyan Pseudochannel Saturation +5
That’s all. (Using Corel, not Darktable. Big hammer, world full of nails, you know how it is.)
great comment, thank you for taking the time!
Thank you very much for your insight, it goes a bit over my head, but that is what I was looking for.
My concerns about the picture are:
- It is a bit flat, it doesn’t pop out, but I am glad of your perspective that it does not need to do so.
- The sky is too light, especially on the lower part, it feels unbalanced to me.
- Due to number 2, I was thinking of changing the framing, so centering the image.
You could always crop it if you wanted to center more on the kitty. I suspect you have the pixels available; If you went out on a safari to even be able to take this excellent photo in the first place, I’ll bet you didn’t do it with a wind up disposable point-and-shoot!
I went ballistic with croping and color, I ended up with a cartoonish image, but i think it works somehow.
In general, my favourite edit was by Trives, I put them all together with a slider here https://diysafari.club/leopard/
