Using Photoshop – How to put pizzazz into twiggy, blurry, dull digiscoped-images

Step 1 – “IMAGE … Adjust … Levels”

To get a reasonable range of tones from your raw data. You should aim for a ‘normal’ distribution curve but in the real world you may have not have the full range.

Move the two end triangles until you get a value [I’ve moved the left one almost to the point where the values start to increase] and then move the middle one until you get reasonable brightness in the image [do it by eye]

Step 2 – “IMAGE … Adjust … Hue/Saturation”

You need to use this if you have [lens] ‘introduced’ colours because of very darks against light [or vice versa] – the colour varies with make of glass

First guess the colour of the cast [in this case blue – Swaro gives green] and select it in the edit ‘drop down’. Then use the pipette to select the cast on the image. The region in the spectrum will then be ‘zoned’. Now reduce the saturation until the cast disappears.

You will probably need to reduce the ‘Lightness’ too – do it by eye with the preview box checked to see the effects

If the colour you are choosing to “desaturate” appears elsewhere on the bird you will have to “select” the areas of cast before you “IMAGE … Adjust … Hue/Saturation” .You can use the lasso tool for this you don’t have to select too carefully -  just make sure you don’t lasso any other part of the bird which has the cast colour in it.

Step 3 – “FILTER … Sharpen …Unsharp Mask”

This is so subjective that the only guidelines are those that I first read about as being common on the Birds-Pix website! Amount – 140%, Radius – 0.9 pixels, Threshold – 3. I have seen "70%, 3.0, 1"  used successfully. Leave the Preview box unchecked while you adjust the values and then click it to see the changes. Take care not to over sharpen – it can make images look very ugly!

Step 4 – On this image I brightened the eye ring by selecting it and then using “IMAGE … Adjust … Brightness/Contrast” to increase the brightness.

 Select the eye [or leg etc] - in this case I used the Magic wand tool

then adjust the " “IMAGE … Adjust … Brightness/Contrast”" by eye

Step 5 – Removing twigs and grass retrospectively ...

Using the "Clone stamp tool"

 This can be a very useful tool to remove twigs or bits of grass from in front of an otherwise reasonable image

This otherwise terrible wryneck is [partially] salvaged - I've made the image size quite small and so the "cloning" is not as noticeable. Any "cloner" would see it straight away but an 'innocent' might not see the "signs"