BLACK CROWNED CRANE
The next composite in my wildlife series is a couple of black crowned cranes. The black crowned crane makes it home in the savannah area of sub-Saharan Africa, from Sudan and Ethiopia in the east, over to the west coast including Senegal and Gambia. It lives in shallow wetlands and mixed grasslands, and often frequents flooded wetlands, wet croplands, rice fields and upland fields in West Africa. In East Africa the crane prefers wet areas, such as wet meadows, large marshes, ponds, lakes, and rivers.
These two birds were captured at the San Antonio zoo. The Photoshop cutout was quite a challenge as the chest feathers and the head crown all had to be repainted by hand after the selection. The marshes are images I captured several years ago at Edisto Island beach in South Carolina.
The acacia trees are actually built using the "tree render" feature in Photoshop. They don't offer an acacia tree, however they have a bush and various tree trunks all that can be rendered in various forms and then put together to build a tree that looks just like the African acacia tree. I just built a file of three of them that I can reuse for various African scenes in the future. No more trying to cut out the leaves from a stock image!
The sky image is stock. I added an inverted copy in a softlight mode, low opacity over the water to give it a reflection of the sky colors. There is one texture blended over the background and it does have a slight painterly effect applied in Topaz impressions just to knock off the photographic pixel look to the background images. I smudged the horizon with a 5% smudge tool just to blend the sky and land a bit and make it not so even.
The birds was not painted, just selected and enhanced with NIK collections; my recipe of Color Efex Pro's tonal contrast, pro contrast and detail extractor. I dodged and burned the front bird to enhance the feathers prior to global lighting adjustments. As usual, my cutouts have a 0.5px feather and 0.4-0.7px blur on the edges to blend them into the background. Final adjustments are made to elements for depth of field. I generally put the element into a smart object and test various blur levels until I get just the right amount of blur to match the element with the background. I also desaturated the colors on the back bird just a bit to push him into the background.
The final color grading is a simple merged copy of the image with a "average blur" in the soft light mode at about 20% opacity. It brings all the colors together. I final levels adjustment to lighten after the color grading and a signature and this one is done.
Here are the images used in this work of art:
