Rufous Sided Towhee

[Steve Smith]

160104

Canon 70D, Tamron 150-600, 191 mm, 1/800,f6.3, ISO 1000

[keith mitchell]

Hi Steve, I like the mossy covered perch but after saying that it does dominate a bit and perhaps pulls the viewers eye from the bird which looks good with it's cocky pose and nice detail. Very well caught.

Keith.

[steve torna]

Hi Steve, really nice looking bird but yes maybe the perch is a little bit heavy. There seems to be some artifacts surrounding the tail; do you know or does anyone know what is causing that affect?

[arash_hazeghi]

nice catch in an alert pose, perch is big but I like the moss, the OOF part of the perch gets a bit distracting though. the bird can use some sharpening and there is some noise around the tail area, looks like the BG mask needs refining. There are also cloning artifices in the BG...

TFS

[Jonathan Ashton]

Given your techs I would have expected a sharper image of the bird and the noise removal mask needs readjustment there are several areas where the mask is in place and where it is missing. I would suggest you try DPP4 for your raw conversion.
Is it possible to microadjust your camera and lens it can sometimes be very worthwhile. Hope this helps.

[Steve Smith]

Thank you all for the good comments. Regarding the patchy noise - I always use DPP4 as my RAW processor and to convert the RAW images to tif. After processing with DPP4 there was still some noise which I removed with a smoothing brush. The noise around the tail and in other parts of the image is just evidence that I am not the best guy to paint your front door. Arash, the cloning artifices originated from removing the biggest visible rain drops - it was raining when I took this shot.

The perch comment is also valid. I tried four different crops ranging from all bird to different bird and perch mixes. My personal preference was this crop.

[Daniel Cadieux]

The perch is nice with all that moss, and although large it could have worked. The issue for me is that the towhee is facing the wrong way and this has cause its bill to be pushed up against that branch. I do not know what is beyond at left, but had the subject turned around and perched further left that would have been ideal. Exposure is good, just the processing that needs more attention as pointed out by the others.