C&c Welcome

[Are You Serious Jo]

Yes, a lot. I learned on CS2 so I'm working through the new features on CS5 and brushing up on old things I learned. Content aware is such a time saver. A bit fiddley on busy backgrounds so you have to do a bit of cloning as well sometimes, but overall it is awesome.

[Kirislin]

Ok, I'll give some tips on what I see. Black animals are hard to get right, did you spot meter off the bird and under expose? Do you know about the rule of under exposing for black and over exposing for white?

still thinking about this bolded part. I cannot see how underexposing black would be good, it would be even darker, with less detail if it was underexposed.

[Are You Serious Jo]

But you aren't really under exposing, you are setting the exposure to what it should be. Cameras are set to meter to give mid tones, it wants to darken very light subjects and over expose very dark ones because it want to turn them 18% grey. With mid tone subjects you can usually trust auto metering, but you can't with extremes. It's a thing, look it up there is a lot of stuff on the net that can explain it better than I can. This is where going back to basics helps when you want to do more than take happy snaps. The best thing you can do is take some bracketed test shots, learn by doing some reading them some experimentation. You need to know when to take over the controls. I suspect your exposure out of the camera was ok in the last shot was because the background was relatively dark. You get a light background and dark subject and you'll have over exposure on the black.

[CrazyCresties]

They are beautiful birds and very different to the red tailed ones we get over here. I love the pose of the birds in the first two :D

I found this a very useful read on exposure for birds shots, but obviously applies to other stuff too :)

http://mikeatkinson.net/Tutorial-5-Exposure.htm

[Juddabug Whippets]

Very cool tutorial CC!