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Thread: Plaintive Cuckoo

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    Default Plaintive Cuckoo

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    Plaintive Cuckoo, Hail Haor, Bangladesh. 1Dm4/500f4 II/1.4x/f5.6/1/2000/ISO 2000
    Thanks for looking. C/C welcome! Ihtisham

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    Macro and Flora Moderator Jonathan Ashton's Avatar
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    I think you have a well focused cuckoo there but something doesn't look right to me in the processing. The bird has soft look about it, yet the caterpillar looks quite sharp as does the bill and nostril. the leaves seem to have pronounced edges to them. This may be die to a variety of things but I suspect the image was noisy at one point and a lot of noise reduction was applied. Also I wonder if the resizing and jpeg algorithm is correct. It is almost as if I am looking at the image through a piece of cellophane.

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    Hi Jonathan, thanks for your comment. Scratching my head. One unusual thing about the image I posted: I was about to upload it when I was told the file size was too large, so I compressed it using a package called FastStone (don't have photoshop installed on this laptop) by slightly lowering the JPEG quality (from 99 to 93) while saving the image. JPEG artifacts in any case show up as blockiness and too much (global) noise reduction almost always affects the sharpness. Preparing the image was pedestrian processing - mild global NR in Lightroom, followed by burning in of the bg highlights and contrast and colour correction in Photoshop CS5. The cellophane effect could be sloppy highlight burning in the bg perhaps, not sure about the softness you are seeing in the bird. Here is a version without FastStone - what do you think? Maybe I should lower the highlights by using selection + curves instead of the burn tool.... Thanks again, good learning taking place here. Ihtisham

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    Macro and Flora Moderator Jonathan Ashton's Avatar
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    Something still looks a little strange to me, I wonder if it is the Noise Reduction?? Have you tried DPP 4 or DPP3?

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    I am not too familiar with DPP. Here is a version that I made without using the burn tool of PS (ie using selections to pick the bg highlights and then curves to reduce them.) Perhaps this helps the bg but the bird remains pretty untouched. I should do some local sharpening of the bird I think.

    btw, there is certainly a fall in quality with the 1.4tc but I have seen some pretty amazing images made with it so I don't want to blame the hardware :-)

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    Ihtisham I have sent you a message

  7. Thanks Ihtisham Kabir thanked for this post

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