Barry Ekstrand
01-12-2013, 07:28 PM
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8085/8374908870_1e21c52d0d_o.jpg
I took this photo of a Turkey Vulture while on a walk around a neighborhood lake. This was just after noon on a cloudless and bright sunny day. Conditions were not optimal for a great photo, this was my first use of my new 5D Mark III and I was shooting anything flying by while out for a stroll. Because of the bright background (sun behind the bird), the dark areas of the bird looking completely black, and the bird's side facing me was nearly all in a shadow, I thought this would be a good exercise to see if I could manage to recover anything worthwhile. I would welcome comments on my effort to salvage the image (there was no intent to make a nice artistic picture here).
Photo info: Canon 5D Mark III with Canon 400 mm f5.6L lens; ISO 800; Aperture priority; f10; 1/2000 sec. I have cropped it to 75% of original.
I processed the RAW image in DPP following Arthur Morris and Arash Hazeghi's common recommendations in the Digital Basics and Professional Photographers Guide To Noise Reduction e-books. After passing the image from DPP to Photoshop I used Nik Color Efex and Neat Image filters for the first time. I made a layer for the bird alone and then ran Neat Image noise reduction on the background sky. Next I ran Color Efex Detail Extractor to pull out some detail in the black of the bird. Following that I ran Neat Image noise reduction on the bird. Finally, I used Smart Sharpen in PS.
I had also tried to use Color Efex Tonal Contrast but I couldn't find a sweet spot with it on this image, I managed to get a lot of induced noise with just a little bit of that filter. I'm sure I have much to learn on careful use of the filter and will get better results with it as I learn..
Again, any comments on the approach and result will be appreciated.
Barry
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I took this photo of a Turkey Vulture while on a walk around a neighborhood lake. This was just after noon on a cloudless and bright sunny day. Conditions were not optimal for a great photo, this was my first use of my new 5D Mark III and I was shooting anything flying by while out for a stroll. Because of the bright background (sun behind the bird), the dark areas of the bird looking completely black, and the bird's side facing me was nearly all in a shadow, I thought this would be a good exercise to see if I could manage to recover anything worthwhile. I would welcome comments on my effort to salvage the image (there was no intent to make a nice artistic picture here).
Photo info: Canon 5D Mark III with Canon 400 mm f5.6L lens; ISO 800; Aperture priority; f10; 1/2000 sec. I have cropped it to 75% of original.
I processed the RAW image in DPP following Arthur Morris and Arash Hazeghi's common recommendations in the Digital Basics and Professional Photographers Guide To Noise Reduction e-books. After passing the image from DPP to Photoshop I used Nik Color Efex and Neat Image filters for the first time. I made a layer for the bird alone and then ran Neat Image noise reduction on the background sky. Next I ran Color Efex Detail Extractor to pull out some detail in the black of the bird. Following that I ran Neat Image noise reduction on the bird. Finally, I used Smart Sharpen in PS.
I had also tried to use Color Efex Tonal Contrast but I couldn't find a sweet spot with it on this image, I managed to get a lot of induced noise with just a little bit of that filter. I'm sure I have much to learn on careful use of the filter and will get better results with it as I learn..
Again, any comments on the approach and result will be appreciated.
Barry
<iframe width="468" height="60" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="http://mer54715.datafeedfile.com/widget/aff_widget_prdt_generate-2.0.php?aff_num=10536&aff_net=1&widget_num=2004"><p>Sorry your browser does not support iFrame</p></iframe>