Northern Flicker (1 Viewer)

[deborahp]

I was taking general yard photos without a teleconverter or tripod handy when this noisy woodpecker-like bird landed in the top of a 35' oak tree. It was backlit, so all I could see was a dark silhouette and was amazed to find all these wonderful spots after the images were downloaded. Unfortunately, they all have this weird pink and green color aberration and I'm not having any luck getting rid of it in Jasc Paint Shop Pro v9.01.

The image attached is cropped only, no other processing. Brightening it, especially the shadows, and light sharpening work well on it, but that's about it other than using the backlighting adjustment, which seems to sharpen the image, but also increases the purple cast. Any attempt at using the Chromatic Aberration correction in PSP causes the red crescent on the nape to be sliced off and attempting to get rid of the pink/purple and green blushes on the breast turn the bird blue. I've tried adjusting countless samples over several hours, so is this not the right tool to be using?

I've also tried correcting color balance, hue and saturation, histogram adjustments, etc... and have decided this app (PSP) to too big and complicated to figure out which function(s) I should be concentrating on to fix this image. So, can anyone suggest some basic steps to follow? I've read the manual and help files, but am not getting the expected results.

 

[Recurvirostra]

I suspect that the green shading is coming from light reflected from the leaves and the pink may be either reflection from, or shadow of, the small vertical branch in front of the bird. In which case I don't think there is much you can do, short of "manually" reducing the offending colours by painting over them with a small white brush set to low opacity.

I found that using the Histogram Adjustment tool and setting the Low value to 10 and the High value to around 120 seemed to improve the bird and the foliage (but not the sky) and reduced the colour cast a little. Not being familiar with the bird though, I'm not sure whether the result is truer to life than your original.

If you wanted to use the Histogram Adjustment approach, you could mask out the sky with a Selection and then work on the bird/foliage and sky separately.

 

[deborahp]

I suspect that the green shading is coming from light reflected from the leaves and the pink may be either reflection from, or shadow of, the small vertical branch in front of the bird. In which case I don't think there is much you can do, short of "manually" reducing the offending colours by painting over them with a small white brush set to low opacity.

I found that using the Histogram Adjustment tool and setting the Low value to 10 and the High value to around 120 seemed to improve the bird and the foliage (but not the sky) and reduced the colour cast a little. Not being familiar with the bird though, I'm not sure whether the result is truer to life than your original.

If you wanted to use the Histogram Adjustment approach, you could mask out the sky with a Selection and then work on the bird/foliage and sky separately.

Hi John, thanks for your reply. I think you're right about there being two different sources for the odd colors, so I treated them seperately, and that was the best solution. I also quit following the suggestions and order in the manual, and that helped, too. I got rid of most of the pink/purple (and teal that's not immediately apparent) with the color aberration filter first, then did noise with sharpening, then selecting the bird only color balancing got rid of as much of the green reflection as practical. Finally, the backlight filter added a little blue to the sky, and the histogram adjustment brightened everything up a little.

I still ended up with a blue-looking bird, but it's the best of quite a few blue-looking birds so far. |:S| The original and end result are below. Thanks again!

 

[Recurvirostra]

Very well done! Your edited image is much better than anything I was able to achieve.

It seems it may be time for me to update my Paint Shop Pro Version 8. You have mentioned quite a few tools and processes that aren't available in my version, and which sound, (and have been demonstrated to be), very useful.

I heard just in the last few days that PSP Version X is now on sale (the X presumably denoting 10). Groan... it's a never-ending process. |=(|

 

[deborahp]

Yes, but the update patches for version X won't be out for a while; this version needed 37mb in updates downloaded, more for a network. PSP Version 9 is still available for only US$51.99 with free shipping in the US at the following link, but I don't know what their international shipping rates are. I bought that box and the only difference between it and the regular full boxed version with CD & manual is a sticker on the box that says 'Academic Version'; however there are no unusual registration restrictions related to the sticker.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=20363485&loc=105&sp=1

 

[Recurvirostra]

Thanks, Deborah, that's a lot less than it sells for in Australia. I will look into it.