How I worked on my BARN OWL image

red eye before and after   original uncropped photo

Last Sunday I was lucky to have the opportunity to photograph a Barn Owl roosting high in the branches of a eucalyptus tree. I put on my longest lens and upped my ISO to 2500 in order to get a reasonable shot of this lovely creature. But for most of my shots his eyes were closed. And in my best shot of him with his eyes open he had a bad case of "red eye" from the flash I was using. Hmmm! So I decided it was time to perform some magic - that is Photoshop magic. I 'fixed' his glowing red eyes, but the shot still lacked impact. He was  surrounded by some very brightly lit branches which detracted from my vision of how I wanted him to appear in my final photo. I cropped the image to make him larger in the frame and then did some serious 'cleaning' of the branches and foliage around him. Then I cloned the open eyes onto the cropped image to complete my work.

Above are the before and after versions of my BARN OWL. I used Photoshop tools and my skill using them to create an image which matched what my heart was seeing when I took the shot. Is it better? You be the judge.