Animated Hunter...

[David Roach]

Little Estero Lagoon this morning. This beauty was fishing in the usual animated way. There were no spoonbills or reddish egrets around so this beauty stole the show.
1DMKIIN 400DO 2xtc ISO 800 F14@1/1250

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great pose, details and exposure control. I would apply some NR on the BG, it looks quite noisy.

[Arthur Morris]

Little Estero Lagoon this morning. This beauty was fishing in the usual animated way. There were no spoonbills or reddish egrets around so this beauty stole the show.

Actually, this is somewhat atypical for SNEG. The bird must have been imitating a reddish... It would be easy to make an all green upper BKGR with some QMing.

Axel, not sure if you have done it before but could you describe exactly your technique for reducing BKGR noise? I for one would greatly appreciate it.

later and love, artie

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Axel, not sure if you have done it before but could you describe exactly your technique for reducing BKGR noise? I for one would greatly appreciate it.

later and love, artie

My standard NR procedure for the background is using the Reduce Noise Tool in CS3 and these settings:

Strength: 5-10 depending on the amount of noise
Preserve Details: 45%
Reduce Color Noise: 45%
Sharpen Details: 0%
and Remove JPEG Artifact is checked

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks Axel. And how do you make your selection (of the BKGR)?

and later and love, artie

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Thanks Axel. And how do you make your selection (of the BKGR)?

and later and love, artie

It's a pretty crude procedure, either magic wand tool, inverse and expand a few pixels or lasso tool if the BG is not uniform enough. I'm sure there are more elegant solutions and maybe that would be a good topic for the learning resource section.

[David Roach]

Thanks for getting the details, Artie!!!! With eagle eye Axel I am going to have to pay much more attention to BG noise. This snowy was definitely fishing and did look like an impressionist of the the reddish tecnique. I think he was chasing a school of something as he was quite animated!!!!