David, I have a very untidy mind, and what jumped into it when I saw the two shots of the female Red Winged Blackbird was: "Holy cow, if Mother Nature had wanted the lower half of that bird to be darker, she would have made it darker over the eons. There must be some evolutionary benefit to the plain vanilla, non-Black Level Slider look. Better camouflage?" Quite a nice looking little bird though; they always seem to perch on swaying things down here so one in a firm stance is hard to find. She looks to be on a none too steady cat tail. Re the SilkyPix Black Level slider: Adobe Lightroom 1.0 has a functionally similar (if not identical) "Blacks" slider control. All the best, Bill On Jun 9, 2007, at 10:21 AM, David Young wrote: All: This started out as a private mail, to Xavier. But I though about it, and felt that [a] there was nothing private in it, and [b] others might find this comparison interesting. Yesterday, on one of the few decent days we've had, recently, I headed to Tunkwa Lake, in pursuit of the elusive "White Grebe". So far he (she?) has not been seen, this year, so I had to content myself with a few ducks and the Red Winged Black Birds. The males were very skittish, but a few of the females landed within 'reach' of the 400 Telyt. As I was processing the shots, this morning, I realized that the day was overcast, though warm, and this led to some exceptionally flat light. Increasing the contrast would darken the darks, but also lighten the light bits ... blowing the highlights. I could, of course, always fiddle with the curves, in Photoshop, which allows you to fiddle with the range more carefully, but it's fiddly. So I turned to my favourite program, SilkyPix, and simply used the black level slider, during "development". For those of you who are not familiar with Silkypix, it is a Japanese written RAW image processor, which is relatively inexpensive yet powerful and simple to use. It's Black Level slider simply darkens the dark bits, without touching the lighter bits at all... sort of the lower half of a contrast control. On shot of a female Red Winged Blackbird just cried out for this treatment. http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/RWB-BLComp.htm shows both before and after, with two, otherwise identical, versions of the same shot. I think the slight loss of detail on the underside of the tail feathers is a worthwhile tradeoff for a much more effective shot. Comments, anyone? Or am I alone in this perception? Cheers! --- David Young, Logan Lake, CANADA Wildlife Photographs: http://www.telyt.com/ Personal Web-pages: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt Stock Photography at: http://tinyurl.com/2amll4 ------ Unsubscribe or change to/from Digest Mode at: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/lrflex.htm Archives are at: //www.freelists.org/archives/leicareflex/ ------ Unsubscribe or change to/from Digest Mode at: http://www3.telus.net/~telyt/lrflex.htm Archives are at: //www.freelists.org/archives/leicareflex/