Razorbill - IQ frustrations

[Richard Stern]

Off the Bird Islands, Cape Breton, NS, June. I know the lighting is harsh, but I was in a boat with a fixed time schedule on a sunny day (excuses, excuses).

D7000, 300+1.4TC, 1/2000, f/5.6, ISO280, hand-held. Minor crop and adjustments in LR4.

I was planning on posting this image in the Avian forum, under the current theme "Black and White birds". Lately my posts there have been critiqued as being over-sharpened, not sharp enough, or too noisy, and I'm getting frustrated in trying to find a happy medium and in getting the sort of quality that Daniel Cadieux, Alan Murphy, Aresh Hazhegi etc. etc. consistently get, but I only rarely get! The other issue is that I'm frequently getting jpeg artefacts in plain skies, e.g. in the top left hand corner of this image, which I have almost but not quite eliminated with a combination of the paintbrush, clone, and smoothing tool in Elements. Apart from generally trying my best to get sharp perfectly exposed minimally cropped pictures in the camera, do you "eager to teach" folks have any ideas, e.g. with this image? I have spent a lot of time trying to get the sharpening and the contrast just right in this one, and it still doesn't "pop" the way I think it should.

Thanks, Richard

[John Chardine]

Hi Richard- Overall I like this- I know how hard it is to get an image of a flying Razorbill. The lack of "pop" to my mind is related to the general lack of detail in the bird. We can eliminate crop but it is hard to pin down what is going on. One problem is that an image resampled for BPN is just plain hard to diagnose. I would be happy to look at the raw image if you can get it to me (do you use Dropbox?). I would of course report back here once I had a look.

[Joseph Cala]

Rich, I agree with John here. We rarely see Razorbills down in CT, and when we do it's only in winter, but I can fully appreciate how hard it is taking pictures of them from land, nevermind in a moving boat.

Having recently spent some time in Alaska and doing a 'pelagic' cruise, I'm curious as how rough the water was when you were out? The reason I ask is because I have many puffin pictures that look similar....from my monitor the bird looks ever so slightly out of focus. It could entirely be the uploaded version to BPN, though.

[Nick Palmieri]

Hey Rich, I don't usually comment on this forum but I feel your pain. I started photography with many very experienced and talented photographers and I often would (and still do ) get frustrated when my images didn't look like theirs. I will share some of things I have learned(I am sure I forgot a few). 1) Don't shoot in crappy light, shooting white birds 3 hours after sunrise is a lesson in frustration! 2) Read Artie's book, get the light position and the wind in the right direction (typically behind you). 3) Understand exposure and get the exposure correct in camera (as far to the right as possible). 4) Fill the frame the best you can (to eliminate crazy crops) 5) Understand how to track the bird and lock focus.. Finally, practice, practice, practice! The better it comes out of your camera the better the IQ... then every once in a while you will get an image that looks like Artie's and the other bird moderators on this forum. .. Looking at your image.. I think its a good capture, the light is bad, I bet you are not locked on the head (maybe the wing) and a black and white bird is tough for everyone! Hope this helps just a bit...

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Richard, one thing I can tell by looking at the image data on my computer is that the image is over-compressed (only 115KB, well under the 250KB limit for posting here). This will certainly exacerbate any compression artifacts that creep into the image when it is sized for web posting. Can you share with us your workflow? I suspect that there may be a better way to do your sizing for web display that will retain more detail and cause less artifact. Do you have Photoshop or some other editing program that allows you to separate the bird from the background? One good thing about blue sky backgrounds is that there is very little detail in them and noise reduction software can be used to make them really clean.

I like your placement of the bird in the frame. One suggestion for more pop to the image would be more saturation. I'm not familiar with this bird, as we don't get them out my way, but I think the eye could be lightened to bring out the iris.

I am going to share a secret with you, as I have done before on this forum so I guess it's not much of a secret... Before I post an image of a bird (or anything else) I go to Google and search on the subject. Then I select "images" and look at the many images that are shown. It is easy to determine which ones you want to emulate. Think about what you could do to make your image look like the best ones that you see. If you don't understand the path to getting there, then you are in the right place because we can help you and would love to.

[Richard Stern]

Hi, and thanks - some great suggestions here. For John (or others who want to give it a go) here's a link to the original Raw file - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nqanf8odpe660oz/89qQ0-Q4Gk . My workflow is - import the raw image into lr4. Do histogram adjustments, selective sharpening, noise removal etc. Export as jpeg at 1024 horizontal to hard drive (or, if necessary, edit further in PS Elements 9, for cloning out unwanted stuff etc., and I sometimes use selective noise reduction again with the Noise Ninja plugin) then use the save for Web option with a file size of just under 250k. Then send the final jpeg version to BPN!

Thanks,

Richard

[P-A. Fortin]

I'm definitely not a pro in post-processing, but one thing that caught my attention. If you really are performing these steps in this order, there is one thing you should avoid: sharpening before resizing. In your case, I would export fullsize from LR4 and perform resizing in PSE9, then apply sharpening.

A good thread on the topic: http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/18534-Important-Sharpening-Information!

But before you get too enthusiastic, I do this and yet my BIF images look just like yours. So I fear there is more to this than just post-processing issues.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

If you shoot RAW, never edit jpegs! You can crop, but never downsize before editing, you are throwing away digital information. The absolute last thing you do, after resizing to web size and sharpening (resizing reduces sharpness) is convert to jpeg.
I looked at the RAW as well. Something isn't right as far as detail goes. Subject size in the frame is fine, shutter-speed and exposure look good. I suspect it is a focus problem. With my camera I can set it up so that the shutter won't release until the focus is locked. Of course it might lock on something other than the subject, like the background, but with a clear background this doesn't happen. So how is the AF set up with your camera? regards~Bill

[P-A. Fortin]

William is definitely right about not editing JPEGs. No clue why I missed that one.

[John Chardine]

Hi Richard- Thanks for posting a link to the raw file. First some observations:

1. Despite the challenging light and bird, your exposure was excellent with neither blacks nor whites clipped.
2. The image was quite noisy overall.
3. There was some motion blur at about 45-90° CCW from horizontal which is contributing to the lower detail.
4. There was mild chromatic aberration.
5. There was a mild greenish tint to the neutral areas.

For the repost I reduced noise with a mild run over the whole image with Topaz Denoise. I did this on the subject as well because I knew I had to be pretty aggressive with the sharpening later on and I didn't want to be sharpening the noise. I used Topaz In focus to tackle the motion blur. It did a pretty good job. I dodged the eye a little to bring out some detail (always a problem with RAZOs). Also dodged and burned the darks and lights to even out a little. Reduced CA in Ps Lens correction filter. Corrected the greenish tint in LAB B channel. Ran a round of heavy noise reduction on the BG. Resized and did some final sharpening. It's interesting to compare the two versions. Mine is quite a bit darker (maybe too dark?), and the sharpening is not as aggressive.

[Richard Stern]

Hi John and others, and thanks for the further suggestions. John, I like your repost better than my original. I think the motion blur is likely the main culprit as to why it's not sharper. Do you find Topaz denoise and Topaz In Focus to be better than Noise Ninja and the various sharpening tools in PS?

Richard

[P-A. Fortin]

Maybe I am asking for the obvious here, but how did you identify the motion blur at 45-90 deg? I mean okay, the image is blurry, but how could tell it is motion blur at this specific angle?

[John Chardine]

Hi Richard and P.-A.,

I used to use Noise Ninja but ended up buying the whole Topaz suite and love it. I think all these Ps add-ons are pretty high-quality and similar these days.

To diagnose motion blur I looked at the full-res image at 100%. From there I estimated the angle/direction of the motion blur based on the main image and halo. There wasn't much in this image so it was not so definitive. I then dialled in the angle into Topaz In focus and compared to various angles from 0-90° before deciding that somewhere in the middle was the best.

[Richard Stern]

Thanks - Here is another picture of the same bird taken a fraction of a sec. earlier - I think the original is sharper, which helps. I have applied the principles described by P-A, William and John, and came up with this - any comments?

I also have a related question - P-A suggests resizing before sharpening (which agrees with what I have always read about this stuff) but others suggest don't try and edit the jpeg once converted. Which is correct? In this picture I did the usual stuff in lr4, then edited at full size in pse9 (because I needed to clone out some dust spots), and used that to resize to 1024 pixels using the bicubic sharper option.

Thanks again,

Richard

[John Chardine]

Hi Richard- The latest image looks really good. I like the colour tone better than the version I posted.

Re. editing jpegs, it is not a good idea to re-open a jpeg and edit that. Every time you do this you have the potential of adding artefacts on top of artefacts. It is fine to edit after conversion from RAW. At that stage it is not really a jpeg (even if you periodically save as a jpeg) but has been internalised in Ps. Jpeg is just a compression technology and file format and the compression occurs at file saving, not internally in Ps. Once you read a jpeg back into Ps, you read the jpeg artefacts as well and then they are internal to Ps. Having said all this, if you save at a jpeg at quality 10 or 100%, it is unlikely you would see any artefacts even after multiple re-openings of a jpeg file.

Regarding when to sharpen, the idea of only doing it at the very last step is over-stated. There are different types of sharpening that can be done at different stages of processing (e.g., capture sharpening which is done in the raw development stage).

Take a look at this classic BPN thread on sharpening.

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/18534-Important-Sharpening-Information!

As you can see it can often be beneficial to sharpening before the end of image processing.

[Doug Brown]

Hi Richard. I know I didn't make the list of guys who take sharp pictures but I thought I'd try to answer your questions anyhow. :w3 I had a look at your RAW file, and the honest truth is that it's not all that sharp to begin with. Some birds sharpen very well in post, but Razorbills don't have a lot of texture in the feathers; as a result, sharpening an unsharp Razorbill frame isn't going to help much. Here's a basic outline of my workflow. I apply no sharpening in LR except for LR defaults. Next I export a 16 bit TIFF file into CS6. In Photoshop, I clone, noise reduce, dodge, burn, etc. Once I've done everything I want to the image with the exception of sharpening, I save a master TIFF file. Then I downsize the image using Bicubic (not Bicubic Sharper) and save a downsized TIFF file. Only then do I sharpen the image and save for web presentation.

In summary, good sharpness starts with the RAW file, and it's enhanced in Photoshop. When photographing flight, I live in the ISO 400-800 range. That allows for a faster shutter speed and a bit more DOF. My guess is that the Nikon 300 f/4 with a 1.4x has better sharpness stopped down a bit from wide open. And with flight, the name of the game is practice, practice, practice.

Hope this helps!

[Kerry Perkins]

Richard, your second image looks much better! As Doug stated, this bird doesn't have much feather detail to reproduce, much like the Glossy Ibis and other species. The best you can hope for is to have nice sharp edges and a good eye, which starts with good sharpness in the capture. I also use sharpening in two steps of my workflow, once in the capture and then again just before saving for web. What I find to be a good combination is Topaz Detail in the RAW conversion (TIFF file edited in PS) then USM on the JPEG after re-sizing for web. While the advice about editing JPEGs is sound, it is necessary to add some sharpening for the final output so this is an exception to the "rule". It is also possible to apply Topaz filters directly in LR, but I find it more logical to use them in PS and then save, so my capture files remain untouched by PS and I also have a new file in LR with the filter adjustments.

P.S. - I also looked at your RAW file and did an edit on it, but it was so much like John's that I didn't see a reason to post it. What I did notice however is that your camera's sensor has a lot of dust on it, so I would recommend cleaning it which will definitely help with the quality of your capture files.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Richard,

Greetings. I took a look at your raw file ... a couple of comments. You are using spot metering and caught the bright white to lower body with your locked focus point (Capture NX2). This is fine for exposing the whites but the darks, IMO, are underexposed. What detail might show is under the wing which is underexposed. Could have gone +1EV (taken in ISO from 280 to 640 w/ a slight increase in ss). As Doug mentions 300f/4+1.4TC is wide open at f/5.6. At f/8, you want to be at ISO800. To recap You were at 1/2000 at f/5.6 ISO280... I'm guessing 1/2000 at f/8 ISO800 would have been better for detail in the darks/shadow. +1EV in raw conversion doesn't blow the whites. Spot metering for in flight shots is pretty challenging.

That said the light is too bright & contrasty to get the blacks and whites. Metadata says you shot this at 11:34. Arash and those guys don't shoot during that time of day.

Post-processing will only get you so far. I think you would find the capture end would be much better early in the day, stop down a little, use center-weighted, maybe. ymmv.

Cheers,

-Michael-