Great Tit

[William Dickson]

Canon 7D
Canon F/2.8 300mm
f7.1
1/640
ISO 800

[Iain Barker]

Hi William

I like this image with no distractions in front of the bird and I like the perch. You seem to have a bit of noise on the bird even compared to the perch. Maybe something in your processing caused that and could be improved.

TFS
Iain

[Ashley Cohen]

Hi William,

The pose of the great tit is very nice, and head angle isn't bad either. but it's clear you've over sharpened the bird massively and applied too much noise reduction to the background. I've seen this often and my dad does the same quite regularly, i've told him off for over sharpening images again today. As you are clearly applying selective adjustments try and include the tail of the bird and the branch it's perched on in the sharpening area as it will look much more natural. If the branch is not in the area of focus, sharpening won't increase noise much on it either. If your are editing in photoshop, a simple amount of sharpening to apply is to go to unsharp mask, and put in , between 100-125%, radius of 0.3 and the last box as 0. Make sure this is on the resized image though and not to apply any sharpening on the full image apart from what camera raw does. Also be careful not to lift the shadows/blacks on the 7D too strongly as it can cause bad noise in shadow areas, speaking as a previous owner of your setup.

[Don Railton]

Hi William.

Nice perch, pose and BG. HA is a bit too far turned for me and a pity the tail is masked partially, but the biggest problem is I think its underexposed by a good 1/2 stop at least... I am guessing you know this and bought up the exposure in PP hence the noise on the bird??

DON