Pileated Woodpecker (Five Photographs) and more on Post-Processing

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The male Pileated Woodpecker is back at the same tree as last year, cleaning out a new nest.

A number of post-processing programs, like Lightroom, on importing your photographs can automatically apply some settings that you chose. I have set up Lightroom to apply some medium contrast, adjust for distortions in the lenses I use and makes a first pass at sharpening and reducing chromatic aberration. In the case of sharpening its very modest and designed only to ensure your photos do not look soft. Chromatic aberration is where colors (purple, blue, green), appear as fringes on some distant objects; the source is in the lens, and at some point all lenses generate chromatic aberration. Most programs have some means of reducing this even if they do not have automatic adjustments. Even with the adjustment in import I may have to fiddle with this a bit in extreme cases. So after cropping my next step is to ensure that chromatic aberration and contrast have been applied appropriately and see if I need to adjust them. Cropping and these additional adjustments take a few minutes.