Fauxto Friday - "Three Little Birds"

“Rise up this mornin’, smiled with the rising sun…three little birds, pitch by my doorstep…”
– Bob Marley

… except for the sun part. Let’s face it, the sun can’t always be there to light up your photos. And sometimes there’s no time to grab your flash or light source or even your reflector, which is almost always the case for me when I spy a little birdie in the maple tree.

Sidenote…I love this tree, which I’ve named Mabel, because it’s right off the deck…a perfect perch for the birds coming in for a snack from the feeder. But I also love Mabel because her leaf buds look like little flowers, and with the ever-changing weather in our area, she sometimes get fooled by a warm snap and will sprout buds multiple times in a year.

One morning as I was getting ready, I glanced up into Mabel’s branches and spotted three starlings perched in a row. Two were sitting very still while the third was stretching out a bit. I fired off a few snaps, knowing in the back of my mind that this photo was going to need a little help to make it look the way I was seeing it with my naked eye.

I failed to mention in my last post that, even though I always edit copies of original image files in Photoshop, I still start off the Fauxto Process by duplicating the background layer. For the birdies, I knew I’d need a lot more light. I started in the Camera Raw Filter and increased the shadow level all the way to 100. (In Photoshop, larger values provide greater lightening of shadows.) I also increased the clarity, to improve detail, as well as the saturation and luminance levels of green and yellow, while decreasing blue. From there it was on to cloning!

The two birds on the left were blocked by branches, and I felt they deserved to be seen more. I am partial to using the Clone Stamp, however the Healing Brush can also work well for this kind of touchup. I spent a good 90 minutes removing the branches…I can be a little OCD when I’m fine-tuning, it’s not the kind of work I want to rush. To achieve convincing retouches, I reset the sampling point on the Clone Stamp well over a hundred times. Once the branches were gone, I dotted a few of the feathers with yellow and green color, using a round brush in Soft Light mode. I was really happy with how it turned out! But something was still missing.

The sky behind the birds was a field of solid, blue-gray color…very flat. It needed something more dynamic. I chose one of my older photos of random clouds and added it into a new layer, selecting Overlay mode. To make the clouds appear more realistic, I used Gaussian Blur to give them a feeling of “in the distance.” The final step of the process was brushing the Eraser Tool on the new layer across the birds and some of the branches, to remove the clouds.

And, there you have it! A convincing scene of sunshine, clouds and nature where you can practically hear those three little birds “…singin’ sweet songs, a melody pure and true.“