Mallard Hen Touch-down

[Randall Farhy]

03/17/2011, New Market Lake, Piscataway NJ. Still working on older files. I like this one for point of impact, wing position and angle in the frame.

Info: 7D 400mm F5.6L ISO500 SS 1/3200 F5.6 Handheld with a short stick grip mounted on the lens' tripod mount.

DPP>"Zeroed" Tiff>Denoise5>LR5 adjustments>PS for luminosity sharpen layer (Advanced mode, shadow tab) and levels tool adjustment tweak. Crop: 68% of the frame intact.


Trying different approaches to sharpening as my in flight shots often exhibit softer characteristics than my more static images. Note: No Screen sharpening applied, a white halo appeared on the neck-line when LR5 sharpen for screen was used on export.


C&C welcome and appreciated.

[Doug West]

Wonderful action shot you caught. The big negative is the angle going away which
is to bad. Cause if he was at least parallel to the camera plane, I would've upgraded
this from wonderful to outstanding.

Doug

[David Kenny]

Great job freezing the action and it looks like you were able to retain the detail in the brighter feathers under the wings. The only issue I see with this photo is what Doug has said. If the bird came down parallel to the camera it would be an outstanding shot.

- Dave

[Casey Argall]

Wow, great shot and timing. I like the detail you have captured, nicely done.

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

'Great timing' is usually a reward for lots of patience and good preperation...

[Diane Miller]

Love it! This angle really shows what she's doing with the tail.

[Randall Farhy]

Doug, David- Much appreciated, these forums have been so helpful in shortening the learning curve to better imagery. I agree that parallel to head on angles are more traditional and aesthetic, they often engage the viewer in some way, which is highly desired. Yet, when things don't go as hoped for we still strive to make the best of the situation and results.

Welcome aboard Casey and Tobie, and thanks! Tobie - Spot on, Motorsports teaches that quickly-you can't just rack off shots and hope for the best.

Diane- I went through some more from that location, found some of a Mallard Drake that hadn't quite mastered the technique. He went in hot, feet first. Made quite a splash!

[Iain Barker]

Hi Randall

Your exposure looks and the timing of the image are both spot on. I don't think this works as well as your Drake shot only because of the angle as has already been mentioned.

TFS
Iain

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Randall, sadly this is really not working for me on two main points:
- It isn't sharp, overall it's soft and at 1/3200sec the image should be nailed
- The subject is flying away from the viewer

I'm also a little lost that you have gone through DPP LR & PS, why two RAW converters, seems a very complicated route with perhaps IQ loss along the way?

Cheers
Steve

[Randall Farhy]

Steve- Workflow only uses 1 raw converter, DPP. The remainder of PP is done on the output TIF file. I've tried using the ACR converter in lightroom, but no matter what I do (I'm certain I'm missing something), when I go to do my noise reduction in PS, there are + shaped artifacts built into the file. I've set the ACR default sharpening to zero as well as making sure all of the other setting fields are zeroed, but the artifacts are still there. This is why I went back to DPP and a zeroed settings TIFF output file. :(

Anyhow, on this version I used a mask on the bird (layer in PS) when I did the noise reduction. Then I went back to LR5 to do the rest of the PP including output with sharpen for screen setting which was omitted on the prior post because of the white line it introduces on the back of the neck.

[Diane Miller]

This RP does look a lot sharper and it's one I'd be happy with.

I've gotten more artifacts using DPP than ACR, if I do any sharpening there. But I don't understand the idea of output from it with no changes to the settings (if I understand correctly), then going to ACR to do what you can with tonal adjustments that have already been glued in. You're sacrificing a lot of tonal overhead that way. It's a lot like shooting JPEG. At least use the limited tonal adjustments in DPP.

I use ACR (from LR5), leaving sharpening and NR at the defaults (25 and 0), and doing the tonal adjustments as desired. When I go to PS I often need NR and use either NeatImage or Nik Dfine (which often give the same result, but sometimes one is a little better). I view things at 100% for this step and have never seen artifacts, but if you zoom in further you will see odd things.

I'd be interested to get to the bottom of this seeming quandary -- I don't see what the difference would be in the DPP vs. ACR / LR RAW processing, with both set to zero defaults. I'm off to experiment...

I've started exporting my files to post here from LR with sharpening set to high, which is a lot easier than opening the JPEG, doing a delicate Smart Sharpen, and re-saving. I would consider some sharpening to a derivative PS file (or parts of it) if I really wanted to salvage an unsharp image.

[Randall Farhy]

Diane, I'm headed out the door (literally) but it's always been my understanding that a tiff file retains all of the information that a RAW file does, with no data compression. Perhaps I'm just not getting my head around the idea that tonal adjustments are set in stone once it's converted. Also, when I use lightroom, I'm not opening the file in ACR whatsoever, the only setting fields being used are the LR desktop. (unless that's ACR as well, then I'm just misunderstanding the terms). DPP is artifact heavy if you use the sharpening tools there, which is why I prefer to zero them out and export as TIFF.

[Diane Miller]

We need to have a long talk.... Wonder how many others are in the same boat?

Data compression is a different thing -- a RAW file has much more tonal range than a JPEG or TIFF or PSD file that has been "rasterized" with a certain set of tonal parameters. You can make some adjustments to the lights and darks but not nearly as much as with the RAW file. (It's easy to try it and see.) Those same tonalities are much more flexible in a RAW file -- often referred to as having more tonal overhead.

For starters I'd recommend Michael Frye's e-book on Landscapes in LR5 -- a great bargain for $15:
http://www.michaelfrye.com/books/books.html

The other two are well worth the $5, too.