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Thread: Reed Bunting

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    Forum Participant Iain Barker's Avatar
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    Default Reed Bunting

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    I took this shot of a Reed Bunting amongst some reeds at weekend. The light was fading due to incoming rain.
    It had a leg ring on the front leg which I have tried to clone, but not sure how successful I have been.

    Slight crop above and left, levels in Lightroom, cloned leg ring in Photoshop then sharpen and export from Lightroom.
    Nikon D7000 300mm AF f4 + 1.4 TC. 1/500 f5.6 ISO 1600

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    Not sure that I've ever seen this species before, quite sweet and I like the reeds. The IQ looks a bit rough, maybe a big crop? With little light, I think you did well, but more depth of field would have been better and I'd run some noise removal on the background.

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    Hi Iain, new species for me as well. I feel you've captured the moment well and never would've known there was a ring on the leg. I also like the composition. Following on what Grace noted, it seems to display a slight amount of camera shake-was this shot handheld or perhaps the subject was swaying on the reed?

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    Hi Ian, you did a great job on the ring and a nice singing pose, agree with above comments .

    Keith.

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    Forum Participant Iain Barker's Avatar
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    Thanks for the comments.

    Grace I was struggling with the light which is the reason for the high ISO and f5.6. The crop is not so big, the bird was just left of center so I just cropped some of the space on the left and a little above. I have not really tried running noise reduction on nay of my images before So i will try it no this image as see if I can improve the IQ.
    Randall I am not sure where you are seeing camera shake? It would be good to know if others agree, I thought it was just be noise from the ISO. 1/500 is a bit borderline for this combination and it was handheld but resting on a hole cut in a fence.

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    Macro and Flora Moderator Jonathan Ashton's Avatar
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    Lovely shot I like the pose, colours exposure excellent.. I get the impression the head is just a little bit soft, maybe more sharpening would help. It could be a very narrow DOF as you mention it is very little crop.

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    Thanks for the explanation, Iain. You had near impossible conditions. I'd try a hint more sharpening on his head and run noise reduction and be happy to have this one in my files.

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    Sweet pose and comp, Ian. I love the perch and all the OOF reeds. With some NR and careful processing this image will likely look even better.

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    I have been trying to improve the IQ of this image but am struggling as the image always seem to look worse to me. What I have been doing is opening the image in photoshop, creating a duplicate layer and then using a quick mask to create a final layer of the the bird and its perch. Then on the middle layer which is the copy of the background layer I have been doing filter->noise->reduce noise with values of around 2, 45%, 45%, 0% and remove jeg artifact. Then I have done filter->blur->gaussian blur at about 2.0 pixels. On the top layer of just the bird and perch I have done an unsharpen mask of about 30%.
    At this the bird look over sharpened to me the noise on the background look like it has more noise if anything. I am going about this the wrong way or missing something? For example do I need to change a blending mode on the layers?
    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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    Hi Iain- Normally I wouldn't repost an image from this forum, ETL is a better place for that. Since the thread was started here I hope that others don't mind.

    Anyhow, imported this one to LR, using a local brush I sharped the detailed areas of the bird and and increased clarity by 25 (seems a bit much looking at it now). I then imported this to PS, made layer for NR. Applied one of the Denoise5 Jpeg presets. Made a mask and brushed out (black) the stick and detailed areas of the bird. This was done in a hurry and still needs tlc, but hopefully it gives you an idea or two.

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    Thanks Randall It is better than what I was getting when trying to improve it. I will have another go.

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    Forum Participant Iain Barker's Avatar
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    Thanks to everyone how offered me advice and especially Joh and Randall who helped me more via messages.
    Here is my repost which is an improvement over my original. I think I went too far with the processing on the original causing some of the extra noise.

    One thing I did do was include a slight amount of luminosity noise reduction in Lightroom before going to Photoshop which seem to make a big difference to the background.

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