Monitor Lizard on a tree

[Prashant Jois]

15/10/2011 7:44 am
Canon 7D with 100-400mm
Aperture priority
Tv 1/250
Av 9
ISO 800
Fl 275mm

Cropped for composition. I should have got the entire tail in the frame :(

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely sighting. The flicking tongue looks nice. The skin looks very shiny. Agree you could have zoomed out or added the space from the left to the right to include the tail in full. Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Prashant,
Cropped how much and which side? Did you crop from the left side? Did you do any noise reduction? The f9 aperture has helped, however, it looks like the critical focus is not on the head. Is the focus on tail? If you can tell us about your post processing then it would be good as I think there should have been more details in this image.

Where did you click this?

[Prashant Jois]

Sabyasachiji,

Cropped from right side and close to 60% to pick up just the Monitor Lizard. Noise reduction was not applied. The focus point indicator shows that it has focused on the face surrounding the eye. Even I am surprised to see that the head section is not sharp at all. The followed the below post processing steps:

1. converted raw into jpeg using canon OEM s/w.
2. cropped the image in PS.
3. Re-sized the image to 800 * 600 (600 is approx when horizontal was set to 800).
4. Level adjustment.
5. Adjust brightness & contrast, colors, etc.
5. Shadow recovery.
6. Sharpen the image using High pass filter
7. Apply unsharpen filter

Pretty much that's it. Anything wrong here? Do I need to change my post processing workflow? Please let me know.