I was just messing with AF when I shot this frame but sort of liked the pose of the bird's head and decided to see what I could pull out of it. The original uncropped image is presented in the frame below, as it came into LR4 with no adjustments.
Canon 5D Mk III, 600mm II + 1.4X III. Big Gitzo with Wimberley II. ISO 400, f/8, 1/1250 sec. Crop is 6% (yes, 6) of the original area. Basic LR adjustments for tonality then to PS CS6 for Nik Detail Extractor, Neat Image NR and a couple of masked curves to further lighten the shadows and darken the highlights.
Not exactly full-frame quality but I thought it wasn't bad for that much of a crop and tonal salvage.
OK -- with this much pushing I decided to try some sharpening and another round of NR on the JPEG itself. It did make a subtle improvement although the eye got a little too grainy.
I can't believe there aren't any comments on this thread. I think you did a good job of getting the tones and details correct. The NR on the second run looks better. The sharpening on the second run could be reduced just a bit. Considering everything this is a great images and a super example of good processing technique. I'll bet postcard size prints will look great.
Thanks, Ed! I had actually forgotten that I started this thread. If I hadn't done the e-mail subscription thing I would never have seen your reply!
It was just an off-the-wall fun thing that I thought was kind of interesting. I agree that sharpening and NR on the JPEG wasn't exactly awesome, but sometimes it's fun to find things in large crops.
I might go back just to see what DPP would do to the conversion (I doubt I tried it), and I think this was before I was using Neat Image for NR, so might be able to do a better interpretation, but it still would just be a novelty item.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 07-19-2013 at 11:16 PM.