Ruined Little Bee-eater

[Andre Pretorius]

Can anyone please advise my what is the cause and cure (if any) for posterization(if it is the correct term) in the BG. The image was processed in LR3 doing only the basic adjustments, then CS6 with adjustment masked layers for levels, curves, and colour. Bird was sharpened on a separate layer, BG was blurred on separate layer to reduce noise. The original image was much bigger, cropped tighter because of "colour bands". No tool could remove it, try to desaturate area, blur tool on all different settings(luminosity,saturation etc). Before discarding image, I thought about posting it to a knowledgable audience to try and get advice. Is the bird sharp enough?

Here are the techs anyway:

Nikon D3S 600 F4+ 1,4TC
ISO 1000
1/400th @ 6,3

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Hi Andre,

Image looks great to me and I'm not sure I notice much posterization. I'm not very knowledgeable about it, but my guess is that it comes from artifacts when saved as a smaller jpeg. In this case, I wouldn't be complaining at all!

Miguel

[Bill Dix]

The bird looks sharp enough to me, and the colors and pose are lovely. Perhaps a little too sidelit, but thats a minor nit, I think. The posterization doesn't jump out at me, but if I move my head around and look from different angles, I can see what you're referring to. Not bad. Did you make several rounds of changes in jpeg, or work in tiff before changing to jpeg in the final step? Maybe another round of blur on the bg would help?? Perhaps someone else can chime in. I certainly wouldn't trash it if mine.

[Arthur Morris]

I am not seeing anything funky in the BKGR. You should not be seeing anything in the RAW file or the optimized image. Is what you are seeing only in the JPEG?

[PhilCook]

Firstly the bird is wonderfully sharp and beautifully lit, especially with light in the eye, simplistic composition is nice, diagonal perch and all framed nicely.

The posterization is minimal and one has to look pretty hard to see it, I think the effect can come from a few causes, but one thing I have found is if I go a bit overboard with background noise reduction it can occur....so maybe a slight case of over working the image

[Andre Pretorius]

Thank you everone for comments. The posterization is on the tiff image as well. Normally happens as Phil noted with blur tool. Apparently one must stay away from using curves on an area you want to blur...

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the pose and light, excellent colors but the details look a bit soft to my eyes. perhaps processing issue.

the red channel is blown in the area under the bill.

TFS

[Satish Ranadive]

Absolutely superb image of beautiful and colorful bee eater. I Like the pose,nice lights and beautiful background.
My monitor does not show any posterization in the BG.

Regards,
Satish.