Downy Woodpecker

[Maureen Allen]

Shot from my backyard blind in light shade a couple of days ago. I wonder if the background has too much noise? If so, would anyone be able to recommend a good noise removal program/CS5 plug-in?


Nikon D300
200-400mm f/4 @ 400mm
ISO 1250
f/5.6
1/250

Comments and suggestions appreciated!

[Peter Farrell]

I like this a lot. Great point of view, the Downy's here tend to perch very high. Nice detail in the lower portion of the bird but a liitle soft in the chest and back area. I do not think there is too much noise in the BG.
peter

[Julie Kenward]

Hi Maureen, very nice image here! These woodpeckers are some of my favorites. You do seem to be a little soft on the chest area and the back so I ran the image through a round of sharpening using the High Pass Filter. I also cropped it a bit and pumped up the colors in the BG because they are so pretty. I didn't think the BG was all that noisy until I ran it through Neat Image Noise Reduction and then masked the bird and tree back so the slight blurring effect only went on the BG.

Neat Image, Noise Ninja and Topaz DeNoise are probably the 3 most used noise software out there. Any of them will do a better job on NR than what CS seems to do (although I hear CS5 is a big improvement on older versions).

[Maureen Allen]

Thanks for the pointers, Julie. I had thought about cropping this tighter then decided maybe I had a tendency to crop too tight :o I will look into the noise software.

[Richard Unsworth]

Hi

I also like Woodpeckers a lot, and have not personally seen this one

BG looks good to me, little or no noise

cropped a little tight on the tail on the repost; can you add back a little?

tfs
Rich