Mottled Duck Pair

[Dawn Currie]

This time, no 2x extender, just a quality 75-300mm Canon zoom, camouflage head to toe, a lot of patience, great morning light, and all the advice I've received or read here in the ETL forum. The sharpness and quality of the images I shot this time around have helped me get over my frustration of trying to salvage less-then great photos in post-processing.

For this image, I was seated close to water with the sunrise at my back, low enough in front of a berm so that I didn't cast a shadow that would disturb the birds. Then, I waited....

Technical data: Canon 450D, 300mm, ISO 200, f/5.7, 1/500 sec, no tripod, retained detail in highlight areas with ACR post-processing adjustment, sharpened, cropped to 11x14 proportions keeping in mind ROT. I'm thinking about cloning out the water droplets along the left bird's neck-what's your opinion?

[Julie Brown]

Hi Dawn. There is a lot to like in this image-the gentle ripples in the water, the HA of both birds, the ROT composition. The water droplets don't bother me.

[Joel Eade]

Hi Dawn,

Good planning and patience. Your image, to my eyes, seems not to have the detail that it should and it's rather noisy on my monitor. It could be because of being a large crop, I'm not sure.

That being said, you did get a good pose and head angle on your subjects.....

I brought your image into photoshop, cropped some off the left, bottom and top to get the birds off center with some empty space on the right. Then I created a duplicate layer and made 2 passes of noise reduction, I then used a layer mask to reveal the birds.

[Dawn Currie]

I really like the noise reduction on the water - I probably introduced it myself by sharpening the overall image instead of just the birds. What software and settings did you use? I've played with the settings in PS, but it usually is a trade-off between with sharpness.

[Joel Eade]

Dawn,

I used the reduce noise filter in CS4 set to maximum strength. I made one pass with the preserve details setting at 72% and another pass with it set to zero.

[Julie Kenward]

Dawn, these are getting better! It is amazing how much a good image still matters even when we have so many post-processing tricks at our disposal. If we start with quality and make a few slight adjustments it will always yield a better image than one that started out sub-par that we "filtered" to death.

I do like Joel's repost as the comp is much tighter but I think you could still take that down more by removing some off the top. In his repost it's still a bit of a square crop and I think a more rectangular crop would work better.

Nice work on the NR as well. I still think there's a bit of issue with clarity and detail here but it is getting better. f5.7 seems a bit short for the distance between these two birds. You might start increasing that aperture to f11 or more and see if that gives you stronger detail in the faces and feathers.