Juvenile Black-crowned Night Heron, Filtered

Today, dear reader, you're going to get a rare glimpse behind the scenes at the post-editing and production process here on the greatest bird blog in the world. You see, Microsoft, in all of its infinite digital wisdom, has decided to keep making changes to the program I use to edit my photos. Currently, I use something that's just called 'Photos'. Extremely basic, I know, but I wouldn't be the Amateurnithologist if that wasn't the case. While it might seem like a setback that all the things I've been doing up until now have been disappeared (twice!), I look at it as an exciting new opportunity. We're going to learn about the new set of filters they have gifted me with together. Certainly they wouldn't just give me a bunch of garbage after taking away options I found useful, right?

Let's find a test subject.



Ok, looks like a winner. I'd say this is a middling photo by the standards of my blog. Not an all time great, but certainly good enough to put up here. The only reason its gone unused is that I've already talked about Black-crowned Night Herons and don't have enough juvenile birds to make a post out of it. This was taken in June of 2016, by the way, at the Russian River in beautiful Northern California. A photo like this doesn't usually get much editing. I play with the enhance feature a little, crop it to maximize the bird-age, and let er' rip. Let's see what happens when I hit the enhance button now..

Oh dear god! This, to me, looks terrible. Well, it looks like 'enhance' is off the table. At least it didn't do that thing where it tilts the whole picture. Let's see what happens to our picture when we select the only other option besides that. Filters with fun names, away we go.

Does our heron look best in the "Vanilla" filter?

What about "Burlesque?" Maybe a little too risque for a bird blog.


How about "Neo?" No, I think I'll take the blue pill on this one.



Ok, I guess I worded that wrong, because now my bird is completely blue. The "arctic" filter is not for me either.

And now he's see orange he looks like he ought to run for president. Why is this called "Zeke?" Your guess is as good as mine.

Well, that was a lot of fun, but our bird still looks pretty bad. I guess I could post it unedited, but that's just a little too low effort, even for me. After mucking around for a while, I found some more detailed settings. Turns out I don't want to 'enhance' anymore, now I want to 'adjust'.

I think this is what I would land on. Hopefully you've enjoyed this meta-blog, and if you have any recommendation for post production, lay it on me, I'm glad to take advice. Oh, one more new feature I've discovered. I can write on the picture with my finger.