Thanks for putting this together!

One of your best videos, thank you!

Such a great and helpful video - thank you Steve!

Another great video . Thank you Steve

Really enjoyed the LR tips. Thanks

thanks so much for the helpful tips.

Thanks for another helpful vid, Steve - always appreciate your uploads.

Great video Steve! Very informative.

great stuff Steve!

Steve, this was excellent. The post processing tips were especially useful.

As usual, your video is so usefull. Thanks.

Well done Steve! Your explanation was very helpful. Love your channel. Thank you.

Excellent video, with many many useful tips, thankyou sir

This was really great. Thank you so much. We spend a lot of time trying to get sharp, focused shots and you've helped us with that. Now, the important post processing work, and this video is super!

Great information thanks for the inspiration, cant wait to apply some of these techniques to my photography

What fantastic images! Best on any photographic channel by far. Good tips too, thanks Steve

great vid! thanks!!

Great video Steve and so well explained. The images are already stunning even before you enhance them!

Hello Steve, One more greate video, Thanks for all you do. Keep well, keep safe and enjoy life.

This is the best video EVER.

Excellent summary of all that post processing can help and be used even for an old timer with LrC

Thank you for this video! Very helpful👍🏼

Great video Steve, as always! More tips to put into my bag of tools. I appreciate the work that you do. Thanks again!

Wow. Thanks for these quick thoughts on creating depth and dimension.

Great content Steve always happy to see a new video from you!

Giving away ALL my secrets 😂 Always a pleasure to see that photographers I admire pretty much have the same processing methods I came up with independently.

Terrific video. Thanks. I appreciate that there's both an in camera and in computer approach.

Wouaou, that was such an excellent video Steve, thanks a lot!

Thank you, Steve.

Thanks Steve. Super helpful. I have your ebook on Wildlife photography. You’ve helped me tremendously.

Excellent as usual!

Great tips. Thanks.

Great video Steve. I’ve been doing this a long time and I learned a few techniques with this video.

This was really good. Thanks.

Great video and tips, just what I expect when watching one of your videos

Great comments and tips. I agree, the vast majority of processing adjustments need to be local rather than universal. But, like all things the more I do it, my results slowly improve. Thanks.

As so often Steve, a great and so well explained and visualised topic. And it feels on my large monitor as if I'm just sitting across the desk from you! thanks

My favorite wildlife photographer!

Great video, as always 😃

Bravo!! what an Amazing knowledge you have! I'm more into wildwife photography than anything else, but still these tips apply! Great great stuff Steve!

The tips are one thing Steve, they are great and I will certainly remember them on my next shoot and LR session. What makes this video special, are your fantastic images, and the inspiration I get from them. I just wanna go out and shoot right now. Thanks a million, you are awesome!

Great job in this video! My best wishes for a happy and photographically interesting 2023! I have learned so much from you. :) I'm keeping this video for further reference.

Wonderful video, Steve. As always, you express useful concepts with clarity and simplicity that even the less skilled of us can incorporate into our efforts. Many thanks!!

I'd love to see more of you editing. I'd even buy a video book, just with you edits. I find your post processing ideal.

What great tips!! I just tried them with a few of my bird photos and they look infinitely better. Thanks so much!

Great video. With the new masking tools this can be so much easier than before. Sometimes I will desaturate the background a bit as well.

Great video. I prefer moderate aperture and a very distant background, so the whole animal is sharp while the background is defocused. This creates a well-defined separation line around the animal. When the aperture is wide open, some parts of the animal may be a little defocused, compromising the separation to the background.

Hey Steve, I bought your book secrets to the Nikon auto focus system, I shoot with a 7200, 750 and an 850 and I’m already starting to see improvements in my keeper rate. I think I’m going to buy the book on wildlife photography as well. Thanks so much for the pertinent and great information.

Wow, great tips and tricks! I need a computer program to assist me in using and deciding which of all the various techniques to use 😯. Another way to get depth can be with dodge and burn to sculpt the subject. Thanks for the video.

Just downloaded your "Ultimate Nikon Z9 Setup & Shooting Guide" - invaluable!! (It did take a whole evening to get through..... :)

you want a good ratio, just not a far background, but also being closer helps.

Randy Bocksnick(Mont) Great content and I enjoy your sense of humor! Have ever you ever been to Montana? Today is my 78th birthday and have been shooting Nikon for an even 50yrs!

As @casperblom2278 said, well-explained and -illustrated -- thank you, Steve! Good point about not over-warming a scene -- more isn't necessarily better. A good Part 2 to this video might be correcting color cast in LR -- color range vs. curves vs. HSL.

Before the video even plays. It gets a thumbs up

Your Vero account is great. So is your IG, but IMO the photos render so much better on Vero.

Great tips (and results!) Steve! And..."an abusive relationship with your Saturation slider"... Ha! :)

Steve, something I’ve been experimenting with in PS is applying the Orton effect, along with lightly dodging and burning the subject to enhance the localized light and shadows on it. Specifically, I’ve played with it on GGOs with their gray-brown muted colour. After LR - including the kind of localized adjustments you talk about here - and Topaz, I move the shot to PS, clean up any unsightly branches, sticks and stones, then D&B the bird and any trees or limbs with directional light on them. Then I apply the Orton effect, which can be adjusted to taste, from tiny to pronounced - I usually set the opacity of the Orton mask at 12-18%. But I’ve experimented as high as the low 20s, which gives a more glowing and painted effect - definitely gets less realistic as opacity goes up. My final touch, which works great with dish faced owls, is to mask out the effect on the owls face. I do this with a low opacity/flow brush so it blends well with the rest. The slight softening and glow effect on the bird’s body and the background seems to enhance, to my eye at least, the light, shadows and depth of both the subject and background. Have you tried it; any thoughts? Applying landscape technique to critter shots is sacrilege to the Church of Wildlife Photographers, right 😉?

Hi Steve, great video as always. Dont you use the dehaze tool to separate the background ? I have got good results dehazing the background on the negative scale..

In the example of the bird with a Radial Gradient, where parts of the bird were affected when the background is being adjusted, rather than use a Brush to clean up the mask areas covering the bird, use a Background selection, click its 3 dot menu and select Intersect Mask With... and draw a Radial Gradient with a good Feather around the bird, and no Invert. The mask now avoids all of the bird (Subject), but graduates out from the subject for treatments such as negative exposure and clarity.

Very helpful video!

Hi Steve, thanks for these tips! For future videos, a small request (my bonus tip for you): the viewer should never have to reach for the volume control twice in the first few seconds of a video. Your music intro is much louder than your narration so I end up turning volume down when the surprise of the loud music hits only to have to raise the volume shortly after to be able to hear your educational words. Balancing these volumes will make your videos even more excellent.

Wow, I actually do some of these. Maybe I'm learning. All interesting. For me though, I always have to add walking away for a while and then coming back to it. It's kind of 50/50 between being happy with what I've done or horrified. 😂 Trial and error is good though. Thanks Steve.

Hey Steve, Wesley from the Netherlands here. I love your videos. As an Nikon shooter myself, I’m going to buy your Autofocus book, mirrorless edition. However I do have a question. Do you also have a book where you explain how to edit wildlife pictures? It’s all completely new to me. In the past i was only shooting landscape pictures.

Hey Steve, have you ever considered doing a subscriber photo critique video?

Awesome video, great tips, I just need to remember to keep it natural. Thank you.

A great video! Another technique that is image dependent is to photograph the scene with a lens that doesn’t entirely blur the animal’s surroundings. Then in Photoshop use a Gaussian blur with a linear gradient mask to introduce depth perception in the image. The subject should be excluded (ie painted in black) from the blur mask. This places the animal in its habitat and draws the viewer into the image. Obviously the magnitude of the blur and the fall off of the gradient must be adjusted to maximize the perception of depth perception and is highly image dependent.

Can you suggest a kit for amatures bellow 2500 bucks?

I almost feel tempted to say, thanks for showing me what not to do. Oh, I did like a lot of the tips. I can't even mention them all. But for example at 4:02 you write that "the bird was just too distant". Well, in the crop you show to the right, I think the background is perfectly defocused. I wouldn't want it any blurrier than that! In many of your other pictures I feel that the creature might as well have been cut out and placed against a carpet on the wall. And the bird at 13:30 has a very dark body that stands out a lot more in the unedited picture than in any of your edits; I don't think I'd want to darken the background. If I've taken anything away from this video, it might be: Don't choose too wide an aperture! And in post: if it ain't broken, don't fix it! In fact, when I edit my photos, I often find that when I've tweaked and tweaked until I was nearly satisfied, and checked the before and after, either there was hardly any noticeable difference, or I liked the before better. But thanks for the video anyway.

You can do only so much in changing the background or your point of view when you are in the field shooting wildlife. Yes, you can sit on your knees or lean left/right but in the field it is mostly point and shoot. The moment is gone swiftly. Knowing your subject and planning the shot up front will help ofcourse but most shots are made in the field in a blink of an eye. And then some come out great, others won't. So great tips but be aware you can not plan and stage everything. You are always depending on light, wind and the animals :-)

why nikon photos looks better? is it lens or software?

This guy himself a university.

this is an interesting topic. may i suggest you speak slower, and break your presentation into two parts, one for the camera technique and the second for the editing. i have concentration/absorption difficulties and rapid fire speech presents difficulties.