Technical Issue Feedback

Taking into account everything that was said, how do the changes look? I have no doubt that there is more I can do to improve it, but just as a quick update on it. I toned down the colors and saturation greatly and obviously cropped out the head/neck to focus on the tail feathers. I'm worried it might be too flat of color now, though that just might be my artistic look on the photo and I just need to get into a different mindset for stock photos.

Thank you all for the wonderful feedback on the photo! I will definitely edit it according to your suggestions and try again (I'll also be sure to post it in the thread again to see if you guys think I understand the information). Sadly the photo isn't cropped at all and it as I took the photo so that I can't fix. I do have other peacock photos that show the full head and spread feathers, but at a different angle. Like I said before I chose this particular photo just to test how things worked. As an amateur photographer, I am mainly self-taught with a single intro to photography class I took in college 2 years ago, and I am brand new to the stock side of photography. I have a ton to learn still.

It’s a great image. It’s very rare to get to photograph a peacock showing it’s tail feathers, in my experience.

I personally don’t think the image is in high solution so one can’t really see if it’s in focus. There may be some noise. Just looking, I don’t think the saturation is overdone - but too much saturation can of course add some unvanted noise to the image.

But in my view there is a huge problem with the cropping which is much too tight - if this is the full image. You have to see the head of the peacock. It’s microstock and not art ...! Let the customers do the cropping.

Hello becca3947,

I love this photo, one of my favorite birds and OH! the colors. I am writing to you to support your journey here in the Adobe stock contributions - do not give up. The two forum members (rickey and abambo)  who offered you the excellent hints are some of the best - so take their advice and try another offering to Adobe.

Make a few changes to this photo and repost it here so we can see that you understand the information and know how to make the adjustments. Best wishes, JH

Hi becca,

In addition to what abambo mentioned, I also think your white balance is off. It is too green - this is because there is a lot of green light being reflected off the peacock's feathers, thereby giving an overall green cast to the image. There is also a slight blue cast as there is blue light being reflected from the blue feathers of the peacock's neck. This can be altered in post-production, so in your photo editing software, you can use curves to change the amount of blue and green by selecting the green and blue of the tone curve and decreasing it a bit. IF you have Photoshop CC, this can also be done in Camera Raw Filter using the colour temp slider and tint slider.

In this example, the green/blue has been reduced a bit in CRF. (Don't know if you can see a difference.)

You do have focus issues though with the bird's neck/head, so that could be another problem.

You have many issues here.

• The saturation is overdone.
• I see colour noise, but that could be also a follow-up issue on the saturation.
• There are compression artifacts (that's also depending from what you uploaded here)
• The picture is missing sharpness, it looks like blown-up from a very low resolution picture.
• And when this is your real cropping, you should take care to have the whole head in the frame.