Green Rosella (Tasmanian endemic)

As far as I can tell there is only one previous image on BPN of this species, namely a gorgeous shot by Paul Burdett of the bird with 'posy' of red berries, posted on 11 May 2018. The species is endemic to the island state of Tasmania, southeastern Australia, and is the most colorful of the state's 12 endemic avian species. This image shows the variety of shades of green on the dorsal surfaces which give the species its common name. Can't help feeling this one smiled for the camera...


Location: Hobart eastern shore, southern Tasmania
Equipment: Canon EOS 5D IV, EF 100-400 L IS II + 1.4x III TC, at 560mm, centre spot servo AF, handheld, manual exposure, 1/800 sec, f/9, ISO 1000, spot metering
Processing: Lightroom Classic CC for RAW conversion and initial adjustments, then Photoshop CC, where final noise reduction using Neat Image was applied to the bird+perch only. The background was separately treated with Gaussian Blur to subdue distracting details. Final sharpening was applied to the bird only, after size reduction to web submission dimensions. There is a problem which was present all the way from the RAW file, beyond me to fix and which I'll leave people to spot, hopefully it doesn't detract too much.


Comments and suggestions welcome as always,
Cheers, David

Beautiful bird well captured and processed. Perch is heavy and I guess you don't like the bright curling bark.

I really like the image, the only problem I notice is a small amount of clipping, which I think is eminently curable, I don't think this is what you are alluding to, it looks pretty darned good to me!

well done and oh so colorful, love the details you captured.

You would have to be pleased with this one. Lovely BG, soft light, near perfect pose and great IQ. I don't mind the perch but that bit of curled bark is unfortunate; with care it could be removed.

You've got us guessing ,but is it the slightly odd patch on the left hand side of the eye-light that annoys you, but in any case the whole image is perfectly lovely .with the bark in or out.

That is one colorful bird. Like the vertical composition the details look good.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to comment, much appreciated. I was a bit uncertain about this one so it's great to get such positive feedback.


Greg and Colin, I agree about the bark overlap, thought briefly about trying content-aware cloning, instead used a tight luminosity mask to reduce the brightness around the tip - probably should have pushed that a bit further. The bird was moving up the perch, and I ended up with a bracket of shots, one of which didn't have the bark overlap - but I chose this frame instead as the bird turned its head towards me to give a better head angle.


There is a bit of both red and blue channel clipping which I'd forgotten to check in the final jpeg - thanks Jonathan for alerting me to that.


To satisfy any curiosity, the issue I referred to in the OP is in the bird's tail, where there is a slightly down-left sloping subtle regular banding which cuts across the fine feather detail and I'm fairly certain isn't real. I think this may be some sort of optical interference pattern, perhaps a result of the linear frequency of the feather pattern being close to an exact multiple of the sensor pixel count per millimeter? I've seen this referred to once before on another forum where someone had a similar issue. Has anyone had any experience with this?


Thanks again all,
Cheers, David

What a great look at this range-restricted species! The shot looks really good for the zoom + TC, but it looks like it's been overly smoothed with
too much NR. The right shoulder, for example, is starting to look a bit like a mosaic.

As for the perch, I think it's cool. It looks really natural. If you wanted to clone out that brightest end of the barky-thing you could do it.

Thanks Dorian, I've been finding myself using the 1.4x TC with the 100-400 zoom more often than not, mostly due to the particular situations and subject distances I usually find myself in. The combination has been yielding surprisingly good results, certainly a big leap up from the previous version of the zoom when used with TC. When I applied NR to the bird+perch, I wound the parameters back around 40-50% from the Neat Image defaults, but perhaps I could have gone a bit further given the low digital noise signature of the 5D IV - I'm still getting used to the differences of this camera from the 7D II which had a bigger issue with noise at higher ISOs (I'm appreciating being able to get more good captures in overcast light).
Cheers, David

David I see what you refer to it is almost like a moire effect, if it is indeed that it can be fixed in Lightroom at the raw stage. Jeff Schewe - Luminous landscape is a good reference.

Thanks Jonathan, I suspected it was a Moire effect, but prior to posting I had tried the Moire control in Lightroom which seemed to have little effect. I will try searching Jeff Schewe on Luminous Landscape to see whether there's anything else I can try.

Just for comparison, below is a link to a post by a fellow photographer on the (Australian) Birdlife Photography website, who had a very similar problem with an image taken with the same camera model but different optics:

http://birdlifephotography.org.au/in...77-magpie-lark

Cheers, David

Details look very nice and I like the close up look at this spectacular bird. I agree with Dorian that a touch less NR would make give the bird a little bit more of a natural look. Perch is not ideal but not bad either. The reds and the blues are fine as presented. Please note that when you downsize an image and convert to jpeg that there is digital compression and added contrast that effects the histogram. Jpegs have more contrast than TIFFs do. Visually the image will look identical but not when viewing a histogram. Long story short, ignore what you see on the histogram of a downsized and converted jpeg and trust your eyes. If it was good prior to conversion that is all that matters.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by David Seymour

Thanks Jonathan, I suspected it was a Moire effect, but prior to posting I had tried the Moire control in Lightroom which seemed to have little effect. I will try searching Jeff Schewe on Luminous Landscape to see whether there's anything else I can try.

Just for comparison, below is a link to a post by a fellow photographer on the (Australian) Birdlife Photography website, who had a very similar problem with an image taken with the same camera model but different optics:

http://birdlifephotography.org.au/in...77-magpie-lark

Cheers, David

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Thanks David I have had a look, I forgot to say DPP Has a moire setting in "Adjust image detail" tab, I knew it was somewhere handy, but I couldn't spot it yesterday.

Lovely bird and image. I agree with lots of what was said above. Moire was my first thought. I would not mind a bit more room above and below. Feather detail looks fine to me. The brightness of the curved bark bugs me. And I could do without the vertical part of the perch right in front of the bird's upper body.

All in all, pretty darned good.

with love, artie

Thanks for the further comments Isaac, Jonathan and Artie.


For Isaac: Thanks for the reassurance about JPEG conversion and clipping. I've had the experience with other images, of the histograms in RAW or TIFF indicating no clipping (backed up by point sample data), but clipping in one or more channels appearing in the JPEG (even at 100% quality) despite no visual difference before and after. I guess only trial and error on the RAW/TIFF processing and conversion would avoid this if it's going to happen, as obviously you wouldn't attempt to correct the JPEG once it's made.


For Jonathon: Thanks, I tested a copy of the RAW in DPP but found the moiré control there seemed not much more effective than the Lightroom one. However, the problem seemed perhaps a bit less apparent in DPP which is interesting. I'll investigate further.


Cheers, David

Here's a version with the two main issues with the perch addressed by content-aware cloning. I'm usually a bit averse to modifying things this much - I'm OK with blurring backgrounds to suppress distractions and mimic the bokeh effect of a wider aperture, but normally draw the line at that. Have to admit the perch mods improve the image in this case though. Hopefully my effort with the bit of curling bark has come up OK.


Cheers, David


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