Grey-backed Shrike

Thanks for your interest, I will be happy to learn anything new to improve my photography. I have taken about 16,000 photos with the Nikon D300s and several others with a Nikon D70. About 3000 of these are uploaded to my Flickr account - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivijayanand... - these are not my best photos, they are a photo-log of my nature photos in chronological order. From these, I have posted to other sites like iNaturalist, Project Noah and several others. I would love to learn the intricacies of Photoshop but I am a full-time pediatric surgeon managing a remote rural mission hospital here in Assam and it is difficult to find more time!

Thanks. I use a Marumi 86mm UV filter on the lens (to protect the front lens element). The camera is set to Neutral 'Picture Control' which has the lowest settings for sharpness, contrast, saturation and hue - these can be manually reset to other values but I have not tried this. I also used Adobe RGB for ColorSpace setting as I edit all the images (basic editing - they are taken with 14 bit RAW and most of the editing is to convert to JPEG and to resize the image for web upload - I also do simple cropping, adjust brightness, contrast etc.). I tried correcting the image by reducing the saturation in PSE and have posted this as a second image. This photo was taken with a Nikkor 70-300mm lens (I have sold this lens after I bought the Sigma). I am planning to buy a Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 VR II lens with 2x TC and this should improve the picture quality and remove any lens related color problems.

I've seen this effect before from other people but I have no idea what causes it. I checked your photo in Lightroom 3.6 but had to use custom settings on the white balance to make this picture look nearer correct. Do you use any filter on the lens, or is there some setting on the camera which offsets the white balance. I know in the old days different film manufacturers used to set their films differently, especially slide films. I wonder if camera manufacturers do the same. I will do some checking.

Thanks for the advice. I use a Nikon D300s with a Sigma 150-500 lens and edit on a iMac 27" using Photoshop Elements 8. I use auto white balance in the camera and usually do not change color settings in PSE. Sometimes I use the auto button for color in guided edit. All the photos are taken in RAW mode.

Hi Vijay, I have been looking at your pictures and although they are good the colours appear to be very, very wrong, especially this one, as it's name suggests, should have a grey back, not a blue back. I ran it through my analyser program and it suggests you have incorrect white balance settings, the temperature is too blue and the tint is too red. This needs correcting, either in the camera or in a photo-editing program, because many of your pictures are ruined by the false colour cast.