My Back Yard Buddy

[CM Prince]

This Great Kiskadee sets around my yard most of the day.



Taken with Nikon D90, 1/800 sec at f /5.3, 220 mm, tripod

All C&C greatly appreciated.just trying to improve

C M

[Marvin T. Smith]

CM. I'm new at this, so you can probably discount anything I say. I think it is a beautiful image of a bird I'd love to see some day. Since you were shooting off a tripod and had plenty of shutter speed, you could have stopped down and gotten more depth of field to get the tail in focus (or maybe the bird was moving its tail?). I think that I see some fringing, so maybe it is over-sharpened (which is what I was told about my first image I posted a day or two ago!). Let the real experts chime in...

[Ian Cassell]

Hey, CM, nice post. I'd love to see one of these. The bird is nicely positioned in the frame, IMO, and is sharp where it needs to be (although a bit more DOF would not have hurt). You might consider some Noise Reduction on the BG.

[Diane Miller]

A lovely bird, nice pose, well-exposed, but I see a lack of sharpness and detail. What was the ISO? Did you do a lot of noise reduction? Was it a big crop? Was the RAW file lacking in sharpness, possibly due to focus being a little off, or some motion blur? (Was the tripod really steady?)

So many factors at play in an image, it can be frustrating.

[Ian Cassell]

On reading Diane's comment, I would lean more towards focus point than motion. When I look at the tiny feathers under the beak, they seem pretty sharp to my old eyes and I don't think that would be the case with motion (am I wrong?). Perhaps the focus point was not right on the eye (which is where it should be). Are you able to go back in software and see where your focus points were placed? In Canon you can do this in DPP, but I'm not Nikon savvy.

[Randall Farhy]

Hi Cm, nice picture of a bird I have'nt seen yet. Going to go with the commentary by others here, I don't mind if the bird is oof as long as the eye area is sharp. Judging by the feet, it would appear that maybe you pre-focused on the perch or it could be thats just where the focus ended up being sharpest. A lot of factors in play, have you calibrated your lens to the body (if it's possible)?

[Sandy Witvoet]

BEAUTIFUL Bird... Great pose! The above comments are all spot on..... my question is: How big of a crop?

[Diane Miller]

Looking again, Ian is right -- the feathers under the beak are very sharp. The breast looks like it is lacking in detail, but maybe that's just the way the feathers are there. Maybe a little more depth of field would have been good, but it's always a balancing act with ISO and shutter speed.

If this is a crop, having the bird a little smaller in the frame might be an alternative -- the background is very pleasing.

[Don Nelson]

C M

Nicely done - But the size is small - only 650x800, at 195Kb.
You didn't mention your workflow, but you may find that another round of sharpening will help you.
Also, a little work will get rid of the white spot just to the right of the head.
This is about the best that can be had with the little jpg....suggest you start again with the raw file
Lets see how this looks....

and keep up the backyard photography and setups -- try some grapes - either poked into sticks or hanging from strings. You'll have some flight shots soon.

[Randall Farhy]

Don Nelson- that really did the trick. pulled out the details quite nicely. I'd be interested in learning how to you approached this round of sharpening as it looks very realistic. Noise is getting a little crunchy on the tail-(certain that's a file size issue) which probably wouldn't be a problem working from the RAW.

[Don Nelson]

Randall, and others

clues in the original posted image - the feet, partificularly the one closest to us, the tip of the beak and the eye, all appear to be in region of focus. No guarantee on that part of the breast feather closest to us.
then there appears to be some possibility of sharpness in the feathers.
But there is no definitive means without giving additional sharpness a shot

Here's what I did in Photoshop. (you could do some of this with LR brush but lack of layers is an issue; that could be solved by "perfect layers" addon)
1. Sometimes I will apply some of Nik's tools, but not in this case (tonal contrast could be used lightly but not needed here)
2. select the birds body and refine the edge to pick up the feathers under the beak and top of head. then cntl-J to just make a layer of the bird. (LAYER:FULL BIRD)
3. Apply noise reduction(NR) to background layer. Yes it does apply NR to the bird on that layer but not the layer above created in #2.
4. Add an empty layer and clone stamp at 50% over the white spot to right. (LAYER: fix spot)
5. on the bird layer in #2, select just the body but not the tail. Cntl-J to create copy.(LAYER: Tail-less bird, sharp 80 == TLB80) You now have 2 layers of bird. This is to avoid sharpening the noise in the tail.
6. On Layer TLB80, filter->unsharp mask-> amount 80%(vary this to task on most of image), radius 0.3 pixels, threshold 0. I will view at actual pixels to see the effect and ensure halos are not being formed. Change the blending mode to luminosity (this isn't a luminosity mask, its only a blend mode. This eliminates any of the subtle saturation or color changes added by the sharpening step).
8. duplicate TLB80 to create LAYER:TLB40 we will use this to get just a bit more sharpening on critical areas. Repeat step 6 on this layer, but keep amount in neighborhoold of 40%. now add mask to the layer that is black. You then paint over areas you might want additional sharpening, and you can further adjust the amount to task by changing the opacity of the layer. Be sure layer 6 blending mode is also set to luminosity.

total time, about 3-4 minutes.

Please note that there are other steps that I have left out if I were starting with a raw, but this is an already posted small jpeg.
Hope this helps

update: One addition- this is the corrected set of layers:

[Jeff Levine]

I find the blue-green border of the BG at the level of the birds head and neck to be somewhat distracting-particularly in front of the beak. Otherwise I like to composition and colors very much.

[CM Prince]

Thanks to everyone that have worked on and reply to this listing

Below I have upload the raw resize picture nothing has been done to the photo other than resize to upload.

Any help will be welcome

Thanks in advance

C M

[Diane Miller]

But something has been done to any RAW file, to make it an image. Maybe you didn't do it, but some software did. What RAW processor are you using? Aand what is the lens? A sharp lens with excellent contrast is very important for the best images.

But this does look about comparable to the OP, except that you did a very good job of correcting the tonalities in the OP, especially in the dark areas of the face. I think there just isn't a lot of detail in the breast feathers. They could probably be selectively sharpened with some success.

Especially in this forum, processing information is as important as shooting information.

I'd say keep shooting this very attractive guy and let us see what you get!

[Randall Farhy]

Don Nelson- Thank you, your time in posting the steps is appreciated, I've copied to my hard drive as a learning aid, this will prove very helpful.

CM, following up on Diane's thoughts-unless you zero out the raw converters default settings (usually 25 sharpening at 1 radius) and perhaps maybe a minor tint value alteration, changes are being baked in. The posted RAW sample appears under exposed which can be a source for additional noise. In this case, it would appear that the sky tricked your meter. You can try over-exposing in these situations by a fair amount (.5-.75 stop) to yield a properly exposed subject, then do some recovery in post to tone down the sky area. Or, you could use fill flash to balance the subject with the background, which will take some practice but can provide very pleasant results. While I don't feel it's a terrible exposure, less noise to correct in post=an overall sharper picture with better tones and crisper edge detail. I feel this image will process just fine with some extra TLC as Don demonstrated. Keep'em coming!

[Diane Miller]

Some semantic points:

Even if you zero out settings, a RAW converter is choosing some starting settings. It has to -- a RAW file is not visible as an image. It takes parameters applied to make it one. And the latest version (Process 2012) in LR4 and later and PS CS6 and later will take a step behind the scenes that earlier versions didn't do, to bring shadows and highlights into range within reason. But it will still show all the sliders zeroed out. In other words, then you can adjust from there -- in either direction.

Shooting JPEG lets the camera glue in settings according to some parameters you have set in the menu (sharpness, contrast, etc). Film did the same thing. Shooting RAW gives you a starting point of "suggested" settings that may vary somewhat with different RAW converters, and which you can tune non-destructively.

RAW settings are only baked in when you open a file in an image editor (PS, etc.) or save it as a rasterized image -- TIFF, JPEG or PSD.