I took this a couple of months ago. Here's the story. I was walking to my front door to take my dogs out. Something made me look up, and I saw this on my transom window (I think my window washing guy forgot to do the outside of this window....check out all the dirty spots). It made my heart ache to think of the poor bird that hit my window; however, I figured I needed to preserve that little bit of beauty. Now that I have the picture, I don't know what to do with it....it needs cleaned up, for sure, but then what? So, friends, Romans and community members, I put my little bird in your hands. Think you can help him out? I'm going to put the full-size .jpg in my gallery if anyone wants to play; actually, I took a couple, so I'll put them both out there so you can take your pick.

This is beautiful just the way it is - it's almost poetic!

But yes, I know what you mean... Just downloaded the pics from your gallery and I'm going to give it a try...

Oh, good. Thank you for working/playing with the pictures. I just know someone with a lot more talent and creativity than me can come up with something gorgeous.

You're more than welcome! I love this photo, it's something very unique in its own right - and I hope you'll be pleased with the result...

Well, here's a first attempt... Maybe not ideal, but it's a start I think...



Now let's see if I remember what exactly I did... I used PSE 6.0 to open the photo in RAW and make the following adjustments - in fact, I moved the sliders until I liked best what I saw.



Then I opened the image in PSE, selected the bird and layered it via copy. I used Gaussian Blur (at a 10 pixel radius) on the background to get rid of the "noise" and then duplicated the bird layer, blurred the new layer too, lowered the opacity of this layer to 60% and merged with the layer underneath (so I got one single bird layer). I used the Diffuse Glow filter (Graininess 2, Glow amount 2, Clear amount 18) to strengthen the white areas of the bird layer and give it an ethereal look. I merged the bird and background layers and applied the Film Grain filter (Grain 4, Highlight area 0, Intensity 10). Then I used the Filters Unlimited plugin to create the "vignetting" effect (this darker, more blurred area around the edges of the image), as well as the "glass" frame.

I'll play some more tomorrow, this photo gives a lot of possibilities...

It's gorgeous!!!!! There's no way I would have ever known to do what you did. Wow.

All my back windows have varying sizes of body prints. Only a few times in my 10 years, have a found a dead bird - so, I'm guessing your guy is probably all right, too. It's amazing how hard they can hit the window and still fly off. Sometimes I wonder why I haven't gotten a broken window yet.

Oops - did I just jinx myself?

You know, Janice, I think you're right. There was no dead bird - not even a feather. He probably took right off. Whatever happened to it, it left a really pretty image on my window.

I'm really glad you like it! And I'm relieved to know that the bird is most probably OK.

I have another idea, but I'll give that a try tomorrow.

Great story and picture. I really like it. My sister had some geese fly into her windows and one didn't make it they found it lying on the ground. She thought they were going to break her windows. She had just built a home on the side of a mountain and I guess the house was in their flight zone. Anyway, thanks for sharing w/us.