This week is a brief departure from the Subantarctic travelogue to share an image editing technique. Next week we will be back at the Auckland Islands, visiting the historical Hardwicke settlement.

For a number of years I have been using Nik Tonal Contrast to optimise wildlife images and have covered this in these blog posts. Workflow for bird images  and Smoothing backgrounds

The following video tutorial outlines how I use the Nik Tonal Contrast plugin to enhance separation of the subject from the background. In this case a bird image, but is is a technique that can be useful for wildlife, environmental portraits, landscape or macro images to focus attention on the main subject. The reason that we love expensive, fast lenses is their ability to render soft blurred backgrounds with pleasing bokeh. They do this by smoothly blurring the out of focus areas which blends the tones, reducing contrast by lightening darks, darkening lights and smoothing intense areas of colour – tossing all the tints and tones into a blender and spreading out the resulting blend as a smooth soft background. This is simply a software technique to achieve/enhance that effect.

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