Solitary Sandhill

[Jim Keener]

Greetings. I needed to move to a larger town to be near a VA medical center. So. I picked Albuquerque, since it's near the Bosque del Apache. Now I can visit almost any time. My object is to learn how to make better photographs, from shutter release through post processing. In order to learn, I must participate directly, I think. So here goes.

At 5:00 am, here were already several cars lined up at the ponds on the road going into the preserve. You could hear the Sandhill Cranes stirring and squawking. And I could just begin to make out individual shapes. The earlier shots I made showed beautiful images: shapes and colors. And lots of noise. A few hours after I arrived, I began to get somewhat useable images of the birds, though most of them had flown away by then.

Here's one I've decided to present for C&C. My major concern is noise. I tried Dfine 2, but had trouble isolating the background from the bird. Then I went to Photoshop and worked with the wand to select the background and applied Reduce Noise to the selection.



Canon EOS 7D II
Canon EF 500 f/4
1/2000, f/4, ISO 1600

Lightroom, Nik Color Efex, Photoshop

Thanks for taking a look. As the forum title says, I'm "eager to learn."

[Glennie Passier]

Hello Jim, I couldn't wait to open up the thumbnail. That bird seems to be looking right at you. I love his wing tips and the colour of the morning. I am new to critiquing, so please take every thing I say with a grain of salt. I'm not sure if he needs that much room above him. I'm with you with the noise issue. I am struggling myself with this.

[Diane Miller]

Wow! This is very cool!! I'm also not sure about so much room above but I do love the detail there. Is it a crop? Is there more on the right?

As to noise, the 7D2 isn't the most noise-free camera but I shoot it at 1600 when I need to. Noise is magnified if you underexpose and bring it up in raw processing. Did you do that? In low light, it can be hard to expose to the right, but it also can pay.

Resist any temptation to "sharpen" in LR -- it will bring up noise. (The default NR of 25 is fine.) I've found Nik's Dine to be excellent for NR. It will make a new layer so don't try to isolate anything. After the layer is made, click it on/off at some magnification to see if it has smoothed out the bird -- it usually won't, by some amazing alchemy. But if it has, just select the bird on that layer with the quick selection tool and hit the mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette to drop out the bird on the NR layer. You should see the mask thumbnail showing the bird white and the rest black. So you'll be seeing the bird from the BG layer, before NR.

The good news here is that the cranes go to work later than the geese do....

Best wishes for your health issues!

[Jim Keener]

This is such a rich environment. Thank you, Glennie and Diane. I am eager to incorporate some of the changes you suggest and get back in a few days.

[Warren Spreng]

Great catch Jim! Love the position and the details in the bird. I would also remove a bit from the top and follow Diane's advice on the NR for the BG.

[Jim Keener]

Thanks, Warren. I was hoping you would show up. I'm going to make the suggested changes and get back.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Jim,

Welcome and thanks a stack for your membership support. Good move. This year was 22 in a row for me at Bosque :)

As for the image, the best way to get rid of BKGR noise is in Photoshop with Filter/Blur/Surface Blur. Here I used something like 3/6. I am guessing that either this was a pretty good crop or you don't know what you are doing when you optimize an image. That said because the image quality as posted was poor. I love the pink Chupaderas and the wing position is not bad.

The un-needed room at the top makes that diagonal line in the BKGR more distracting than it needs to be.

Thus the repost. Please let me know if I can be of any help. a

ps: you came to the right place to learn!

[Arthur Morris]

ps: some more room in front of the bird would not hurt :) a

[David Salem]

Hi Jim,
Nice to see that you are settling in and getting out to shoot. Nice wing position and pose. The rest has been mentioned. Keep getting out there as much as can. Getting better!

[Jim Keener]

Wow. Attention from some more very serious players. Thanks all. First, Artie, both are true: big crop, and I don't know what I'm doing with optimizing. A lot to learn. As you say, I'm in the right place, and as David says, I'll keep getting out. Heading down tomorrow morning. Meanwhile I made the changes I understand that I should make. One of the things I'm learning with this exercise that I have a lot to learn in Photoshop. And I've begun one of Julieanne Kost longer tutorials.

[Diane Miller]

What did you do? Did you go back and redo the raw conversion? That's the place to start when there is a noise issue. The BG has less noise, but you have lost detail in the bird. With a big crop, detail will be minimal to start with.

Be very cautious with both sharpening and noise reduction -- both have major limitations, and they work against one another. Those are things you want to maximize in the image capture.

It's hard to evaluate detail in a posted JPEG, but you can look at your images at 100% and be the best person to see how you're doing.

[Arthur Morris]

Wow. Attention from some more very serious players. Thanks all. First, Artie, both are true: big crop, and I don't know what I'm doing with optimizing. A lot to learn. As you say, I'm in the right place, and as David says, I'll keep getting out. Heading down tomorrow morning. Meanwhile I made the changes I understand that I should make. One of the things I'm learning with this exercise that I have a lot to learn in Photoshop. And I've begun one of Julieanne Kost's longer tutorials.

Hey Jim,

Whatever you did the repost looks much better. And I love the crop :) Are you on a PC or a MAC? LMK and I will have lots of advice for you.

And I can say this, with the 500 and a 7D II you should be able to get frame filling shots of the cranes leaving the pools in the morning. Tip; the birds are closer at the north crane pool, the one that I call Harry's Crane Pool. a

[Jim Keener]

Hey, Diane and others,

Sorry I took so long. As suggested, I started over and after cropping and adjustments in LR, exported a PSD file, opened it in PS, and used Dfine as suggested. (Thanks, Diane.) I'm eager to know your responses. Thanks.


I noticed that I had applied a vignette with Color Efex in the original, and here is the updated image with the vignette.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Jim, You need to come up with a consistent workflow. Digital Basics should help with that. Both images in Pane 13 are showing lots of BKGR noise. See the stuff on Filter/Blur/Surface Blur in Digital Basics. When you use that remember that it is applied to the BKGR only. I'd love to get my hands on the RAW file for this one to see what DPP 4 and Photoshop could do with it. Do you have any way to get me the RAW file, something like Hightail??? Or could you upload the RAW to somewhere where I could grab it? a

[Arthur Morris]

I took one last crack at it. I worked with the lower image in Pane 13. I believe that you need to go back to square one as the image quality was poorer than I remember when working with my first repost.... All that I did this time was run Filter/Blur/Surface Blur on the BKGF at 2/3 and sharpen the face with a Contrast Mask. But, not many pixels to work with.... Get me that RAW file if you can :)

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks for sending me the RAW file Jim. I converted it in DPP 4 and used my standard Photoshop workflow most especially including Filter/Blur/Surface Blur on the background only, some Eye Doctor work, and my NIK Color EFX Pro 50/50 recipe at 35%. Total time: about 4 minutes....

Your RAW file was about a full stop underexposed; this is not what you want to go with a 7D III ISO 1600 file . And your crop was way too tight.....

Non-the-less there was a pretty good image in your RAW file.

artie

[Jim Keener]

I'm very grateful, Artie. And I've learned a lot.

[Glennie Passier]

The bigger version certainly works for me. Artie has done a great job here. I've learnt a bit about surface blur as well.

[Jim Keener]

Thanks, everyone. This has been a heady learning experience. Here are some of my takeaways:
- shoot to the right
- use NIK plugins in Photoshop, rather than Lightroom, where layers and layer masks are available
- spend more time on composition/cropping
- carefully review post process
- sharpen the final image

And yes, there's a good chance i've gotten some of this wrong. But then, I'm Eager to Learn.