Gubbs Swans - Recovering highlight detail

I enhanced this photo of Gubbs' in a different thread and he asked how. I originally used some features of PS that aren't in PS/Elsments, which is what Gubbs has, so I redid with only techniques I think are in Elements.

Here is the original swan photo:



A very nice image, and worth some work. We'd like to emphasize the whitness of the swans without losing the detai of their feathers. In fact we'd like to make the feathers stand out more. We'd like to add snap (excuse the pun) to the beaks and water, which are a little flat.

I tried using just USM on the straight image, but could not sharpen enough to make the feathers stand out without oversharpening in other places. So my strategy was to make an layer just for sharpening the feathers and then blend it in selectively.

In order to make the feathers really stand out, we'll want to increase the contrast in that area of the picture before we sharpen. This will make USM do it's job better and also make it easier to see the contrast that is actually there. So I started out using curves on my duplicate layer. Here are the curves:



This is a very extreme curve and it has a very extreme effect:



This move uses all the available contrast on just the light part of the swans, where the feathers are that I want to emphasize. After this, I sharpened with USM parameters that are way too extreme for normal circumstances:



And the result isn't very pretty:



But at this point, the light feathers have the effect I was looking for. Now we just want to restore the rest of the image while retaining the ultra realistic feathrs.

I did this by setting the blending options of the sharpened layer:



There are three things to notice here; the blending mode is normal, which just means that the topmost layer obscures the lower layers. The opacity is about 80% which means some of the lower layer will be visible. Most importantly, I have set the blending-if options so that the sharpened layer will ONLY be visible if the bottom layer is quite light. I split the little arrow (using alt-click on a pc or option-click on a mac) to indicate that the blend should be gradual over the indicated region.

Here is the result of this blending:



The feathers have shaped up, but we are still lacking snap. In full PS, I used LAB curves for the next two steps, but the same effect can be accomplished any number of ways, and the tools I did use are in Elements.

I increased the saturation in order to make the beaks and water "pop":





This worked for the beaks and water, but it also emphasized the slight bluish cast of the feathers, probably a reflection from the water and/or sky. This was fine before we increased the saturation, but now I find it noticable. So, once again, I used curves, this time only to control the blue highlights:



I didn't rely on my eye to write this curve. Instead I set some color sampler points in the light parts fo the swans and found that, yes, they were a little blue. Then I wrote the curve to neutralize this points without too much impact on the rest of the image.

And here is the result:



Granted this was a lot of steps and a lot of thought in order to accomplish a very subtle difference. It isn't like the moves Andy loves that completely change the image. Here I was just trying to bring out the best without really changing anything. If I achieved my goals, the difference IS subtle but meaningful. It will be more meaningful when this image is printed.