Tufted Titmouse

[CM Prince]

Taken with Nikon D90, 1/200 at f 6.3, ISO 400, 500 mm




C&C greatly appreciated,
just trying to improve.

Thanks for looking

C M

[Grant Yang]

Nice background and a nice pose. I think the noise reduction went a little overboard though. You've smoothed out all the feather details, and all the texture on the branches and leaves. I'd try to tone down the noise reduction on the foreground elements, and selectively denoise background only.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Hi CM...Great pose, great BG, nice branch..... but have to agree with Grant....Maybe too much NR? (or, at 200, ss may have been a bit slow for these little birds...or, was it hand-held?) Would love to see the basic out-of-the-camera image...TFS!

[CM Prince]

Sandy

This is the jpg file from camera, I also have the raw file.



Thanks for the help

C M

[Diane Miller]

Yes, your OP unfortunately suffers from too much noise reduction. Try the same color and tonal work, but leave off the NR and you will have a more pleasing image. The IQ isn't the best (sharpness and detail are not great) but in some cases a little noise can give some "bite" to the image, giving a little more impression of sharpness, similar to film grain in the old days. I think we hear too much these days about the importance of banishing all noise. If you can, good, but you can't always, and sometimes we just have to accept it.

You might want to look at the color processing, too. I don't know the bird, but should it be that blue?

It almost looks as though the focal plane fell on the metal piece. Some of the leaves at the very top look like they are closer than the bird, and appear sharper. I'd suggest working on getting a single focus point (or small cluster) right on the subject, and steadying the camera as much as possible, for maximum sharpness. Both are more important than one might think, when you start looking at details in an image. At 500mm I'd want a SS of more like 1/1000 if possible, even with image stabilization. But then you need more light -- higher ISO or wider aperture -- an unpleasant balancing act! More light on the subject is the best help.

Keep working on it -- we'd love to see what's working for you!

[keith mitchell]

Must say I prefer the repost it looks a lot more natural but is certainly a bit OOF ,looks like you have some good suggestions above.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Repost is SO much better detailed! Bird colors are excellent too! (OP was too blue). The BG in the RP is much more natural also. ...Take a try with Diane's suggestions from there.... she has the best "eye" and recommendations!

[Diane Miller]

But the RP is very dark and low contrast. The histogram is almost all in the left half. Here's a simple Curve to bring up exposure -- nothing else done. Other issues weren't addressed: The blacks look very dark and without detail, although they don't show as blocked up on the histogram. And colors aren't very exciting -- an exposure that was higher initially might have captured more color. And you'll see that there is now significant posterization in the BG from lightening the subtle gradients there. That's because I worked on the 8 bit JPEG. But oddly, your RP is more posterized than the camera JPEG you show, which looks identical in tonalities. If you re-save a JPEG you compress tonal information. Always work in .psd of .tif format, and only save to JPEG as a derivative image to post to the web.

If you lighten in the RAW converter you'll have many more tonal levels to work with, but best of all is getting a good exposure to start with. And even after that, it's always best to bring an image from RAW into PS in 16 bits, to allow smoother tonal corrections.

(I cropped this screenshot just a little from the left, just to fit the size requirements here.)