Black and white little fellow

[Mats Honkamaa]

http://obj.fotosidan.se/obj/photo/f1/f18ebdb56eb8f4b95b6766a6ea687fdf.jpg
Camera: Canon EOS 400D
Lens: Canon EF 400/5.6L USM
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
Aparture Value: f/5.6
ISO: 400

What about this little fellow. Im a PS newbie, tried to sharpen this photo but it added alot of noise in the background so I did a selective sharpening on the bird. What about the composition, exposure, head angel and the perch? I really like the BG maybe a little bit noisy?

[Lance Peters]

Hi Mats - I like the composition - more room in front than behind (for him to look into) Like the head angle and the eye contact. Love the BG.

Seems to be a bit of a blue cast on the birds breast. BG noise can be easily removed with Noise ninja or other NR reduction software.

:)

[Jodee Novak]

HI Mats,

Love the BG and the simple line of the branch and its texture. I think you did a good job on selective sharpening of the bird. Very clean composition, and agree with Lance on the head position and the space in front of him - makes you wonder what has this little guy's attention!!!

[Oscar Zangroniz]

Good composition and head angle.

[Alfred Forns]

Good one Mats You did get lots of things right with the bird as you mention The one thing that would have made it better is the light !!!

Exposure wise you did as good as possible I downloaded the image and there are some blocking on the shadows and slight over on the highlights About equal on both sides Nothing you could the there !!

When you finish the sharpening over the entire image might want to go to edit>fade smart sharpen then set it to luminosity It will not affect the color pixels affecting the nose !!! Neat trick !!!

[Dave Slaughter]

Excellent shot! Thanks for posting.
I use a 400d also. It seems that with my camera there is negligible noise at ISO 200, noticeable but not terrible noise at ISO 400, and distracting noise at 800. Sometimes the light is such that I need the higher iso readings but the image suffers as a consequence. One quick way to get rid of backgound noise in photoshop elements with a fairly uniform background, is to create a duplicate layer, erase the bird and branch in that layer, then apply a gaussian blur to the background. In the original layer do your sharpening, etc, and the flatten the image. The background will then be soft and without noise speckles. Noise reduction software I'm sure would do the same or better, but you might try this method.