Northern Shoveler

[John Stuelpnagel]

This image was taken in Santa Barbara last week with overcast sky. I had to increase the ISO to compensate for the lack of light and then used Neat sw to manage the noise during processing. Thanks for looking.

Handheld
Manual, ISO 3200, 1/2500, f5.6
IDX, 840mm

[Iain Barker]

Hi John

I really like the pose and angle of the bird and the exposure looks spot on. There is a little noise on the wings but I guess that can't be helped at iso 3200. Can fault it apart from that.

TFS
Iain

[Dennis Zaebst]

Great capture John. Great skill in getting that one in sharp focus. Noise looks good. How much noise suppression did you need at ISO 3200? I have heard the 1DX is terrific at that ISO.

[John Stuelpnagel]

Great capture John. Great skill in getting that one in sharp focus. Noise looks good. How much noise suppression did you need at ISO 3200? I have heard the 1DX is terrific at that ISO.

Thanks Dennis. I used the Neat Plug-in for Photoshop CC to reduce the noise. On the background, I performed two rounds of noise reduction at the default settings. On the bird layer, I set the Noise Levels to Hi -30, Med -35, Lo -40, and the Noise Reduction levels at Hi 80%, Mid 70%, Lo 60%. I think that the 1DX does a great job at the higher ISOs, but that the noise reduction during processing is still required.

[Karl Egressy]

Excellent shooting angle nice flight pose and nice colors and details in the bird. Background looks nice and smooth.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Great wing position on this one. Only thing I would do is remove some from the top (maybe a 16:9 crop?)

[arash_hazeghi]

it is a nice dynamic pose and a good BG although I wish the shoveler had not intersected with the horizon line. IQ is not really good for a 1DX, details are a bit coarse and grainy. I can usually get a better output even at ISO 12,000 or more. If the RAW was sharp (?) your image processing software/workflow isn't optimized.

TFS

[gail bisson]

This is a terrific image.
Sharp, great incoming flight angle,lovely wing position and great layered BG.
I would take a bit off the top.
Was this image underexposed initially? This may be why we see some noise in the bird. I agree that with the 1DX, there shouldn't be a problem with noise at ISO 3200.
I would definitely rework the PP as this is a great shot,
gail

[John Stuelpnagel]

Iain, Dennis, Karl, Miguel, Arash and Gail, I really appreciate your comments. Here is another version of the picture. I would be interested if you think that it is an improvement. In the first post, I may have been heavy handed in the use of NIK filters for detail, contrast and sharpening. Also, when I reprocessed this image and tried various noise filter settings on the bird layer, I decided that I lost too much detail. In this version, all I did was crop, levels, curves, bg noise reduction, resizing and mild sharpening (using one pass of SmartSharpen at 0.3/70). I also moved the bird up in the frame during the crop and removed a couple of water drops that I found a little distracting. To address Gail's question on exposure, I did not have to boost the exposure, just boosted the mids a little bit to compensate for the curve adjustment. Again, I appreciate all your help and sorry for the delayed response as work travel got in the way of fun!