I wanted to work on a photo that I had not previously posted to demonstrate how wonderfully amazing Silver Efex Pro 2 is if anyone is debating purchasing this product or not. I took this photo back in December of the penguin exhibit which is sponsored by Southwest Airlines. There is not much lighting in the exhibit and I did not have my tripod with me, so the ISO is very high in this shot (6400 actually). I used the Tamron 28-300mm lens (focal length for this shot being 238mm) to get a good bit of zoom to capture just the two penguins and some of the background.
But the real "pop" from this shot comes from the post processing, mainly using Silver Efex Pro 2. I used a couple of presets (which I did not modify at all) and blended the results together to form this photo. There is also a very nice "border" feature in SEP2 which allows more flexibility for creating photos (for example, my Old-Fashioned Friday posts are going to benefit from the borders!). The Selective Color feature is great too, it does a good job processing color(s) in as small or as large of an area as you want. While you will sometimes get some bleeding, it is much easier to clean up a small portion manually than trying to do it all by hand. The total time to get the coloring in this shot took about 3 minutes, the other 12 or so minutes of processing was just trying to get the background and bordering exactly how I wanted it.
I am planning to visit Sea World today for several shots as soon as the rainy misty weather burns off (which should be around 11 or 12). I did not plan for this photo to be today's post, but I am so happy with the result it just ended up that way that it became the topic of today's blog post!
Pair of Penguins
Please feel free to leave comments/feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos!) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!
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