African Fish Eagle in evening light.

Canon 5DM3, Canon 400 f5.6@f7.1m, 1/400, ISO 800. PP: CC, CEP to bring out the colors. Image captured on Chobe River from a boat.

I like the evening ambiance with the orange sky. Unfortunately the IQ isn't there, the bird is quite soft and noisy

TFS

Yep, appealing late day mood is certainly present here. I agree with Arash about the IQ though, at that low ISO (for a 5D3) you should not have so much noise. Was this a large crop, and did you need to recover the shadows?

The cropped image was 14.3MP. Here's a clip from ACR showing the Basic adjustments. I used NIK Detail Extraction (4%) on the white feathers, beak, and the grass in front. And, NIK DeNoise was applied to entire image to reduce noise. I'd certainly appreciate help with keeping noise down as much as possible.

Hi Doug,

My guess is the RAW file was quite soft and all the processing with NIK etc. just made it worse. Can you post a close crop of the raw file (at 100% view) ? If a file is sharp and clean you don't really need any of this so-called detail extractor filters etc. just basic processing will do.

best

Looks like it needed a significant boost in Exposure, and perhaps then some move to the left with Highlights. I wouldn't increase Contrast -- deal with it with the other sliders. Leaving it at 0 will help mute the saturation. It's very unusual to need to push Whites that far. Pushing Exposure would be better.

Better not to underexpose -- there's no way to recover IQ in that case.

I will leave the processing issues to those more expert than me so will just comment on the image save for my final comment. You have a fine bird and a great setting. A bit more room at the bottom would help.
Given what you have, you might attempt a dark moody rim light type image and see if it works aesthetically?

Thanks all for you helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks for pointing out the benefit of adding more room on the bottom.

Maybe I should explain my goals for this image. I was primarily interested in capturing the beautiful orange sky with the bird as a moody focal point. I'm not convinced that an exposure setting high enough to properly expose the bird would have achieved that goal, but I'm certainly eager to listen to advice. I have numerous fish eagle pics in bright or overcast light, but not so many that show, at least to me, that unique and beautiful Chobe sunset light.

Here's the "un-molested" image. Set everything to default, dimension to 1200 wide, size <400k, and Save Image.

Hi Doug,

Thanks for posting the original, it is quite challenging to get the right exposure for both the bird and the sky in one shot here as the scene has more than 10 stops of latitude between the shadows and the highlights. So I agree that your exposure is right for what you intended to capture, i.e. the sky. You could have pushed it by maybe another 1/3 stops but it wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Noting all of the above, it may still be possible to get something out of this file, *IF*, as I mentioned in pane 5, the RAW file is sharp. I can't tell from the small size if it were sharp or not. Can you upload the RAW somewhere ?

Thanks, Arash,

I couldn't find a public site to upload the raw file and my Smugmug website didn't like the .cr2 extension. So, I've PMed you a link to a Dropbox folder.

Hi Doug,
I looked at your RAW file, unfortunately it isn't just soft, it is completely OOF (out of focus). I wish I could help but in this case it is sadly a missed opportunity

here is a close crop of the eagle's head, the camera didn't lock focus

Attachment 159055

Hint: In DPP you can turn on the AF grid, the Active AF sensor is displayed in red. When no sensor is red it means the camera didn't lock focus ( also evident from the extremely soft crop). Unfortunately nothing can be done to a photo that is OOF

Attachment 159056