A tern and its catch

[Adhika Lie]

One of my favorite subject to photograph... Tamron 150-600 @ 600mm, f/9.0, 1/3200, ISO640. Processed in LR, cropped from 24MP to 10.8MP.

[arash_hazeghi]

that's an Elegant tern and I like the small fish, there is too much empty space though. I'd crop this one tight to show the details from the bird. nice warm light too

[Adhika Lie]

Arash, thanks for the ID & suggestion. Here is another try with a tighter crop, it's 6.9MP in total now which means this is about 30% of the original pixels which were mostly water anyway.

[Adhika Lie]

And this is 18.3% pixels remaining. Can't really decide.

[Tim Foltz]

Adhika, I agree with Arash on the tighter crop especially when the environment isn't really adding to much to the overall interest/feel to the image.

-Tim

[arash_hazeghi]

last repost is the best

[Andrew Harrell]

Question to all: it is my understanding that when doing such a heavy crop, your IQ suffers due to noise or loss of sharpness. I don't see this in Adhika's shot - am I missing seeing it, or is it not there (noise)?

I should add-- nice shot Adhika!! Like these Elegant terns; I don't have any photos of them yet ......

AP

[Adhika Lie]

Arash & Tim, thanks!

Question to all: it is my understanding that when doing such a heavy crop, your IQ suffers due to noise or loss of sharpness. I don't see this in Adhika's shot - am I missing seeing it, or is it not there (noise)?

I should add-- nice shot Adhika!! Like these Elegant terns; I don't have any photos of them yet ......

AP

AP, thanks for the kind words. If I understand this correctly, after the crop, I still have 2572x1714 pixels left and I exported at 1200x800. So in that sense I am not upsizing and thus could preserve all the details in the image.

[Andrew Harrell]

Arash & Tim, thanks!



AP, thanks for the kind words. If I understand this correctly, after the crop, I still have 2572x1714 pixels left and I exported at 1200x800. So in that sense I am not upsizing and thus could preserve all the details in the image.

Adhika: I understand what you are saying, but as an example my recent Osprey profile shot had noise that was supposedly generated by the crop (as well as other factors). What I'm wondering now is that the noise was not generated by the crop so much as it was the under-exposure in the camera and the subsequent LR editing to get back the exposure that really generated the noise. Or else, my particular camera generates noise at ISO levels lower than your camera .....

So I'm just trying to better understand.


AP

[arash_hazeghi]

Andrew,

your understanding isn't quite correct.

How much you can crop the image greatly depends on the camera model used and the initial quality of RAW. For e.g. a 50% crop from a 5DSR camera has more pixels and a higher quality than a full-frame image of a 7D2.

If a file is tack sharp and clean you can make very tight crops without the loss of quality for small web presentation. As a rule of thumb each side of the image has to be aprox. twice as large as the final intended size. in Adhika's case, his cropped image is 2500 pixels wide which is 2X the final size i.e. 1200 pixels so he was able to get an acceptable IQ.

However if you try to make a tight crop from a file that was noisy, soft or underexposed the quality will degrade significantly.

I just looked at your osprey photo, the camera you are using doesn't compare well with a full-frame DSLR like the one Adhika was using, in terms of the quality of its files, plus that image was underexposed too, so you won't be able to crop much without too much noise.

hope this helps

[Adhika Lie]

Adhika: I understand what you are saying, but as an example my recent Osprey profile shot had noise that was supposedly generated by the crop (as well as other factors). What I'm wondering now is that the noise was not generated by the crop so much as it was the under-exposure in the camera and the subsequent LR editing to get back the exposure that really generated the noise. Or else, my particular camera generates noise at ISO levels lower than your camera .....

So I'm just trying to better understand.


AP

AP,

Fascinating. I have never paid attention to this until you bring it up. I didn't know that noise will be generated with a crop. If there is anything, I thought less noise would be visible due to downsampling. But I could very well be wrong.

[arash_hazeghi]

AP,

Fascinating. I have never paid attention to this until you bring it up. I didn't know that noise will be generated with a crop. If there is anything, I thought less noise would be visible due to downsampling. But I could very well be wrong.

noise is not generated by cropping of an image. tight crops look noisier because fewer pixels are averaged to generate the final image.

[Adhika Lie]

noise is not generated by cropping of an image. tight crops look noisier because fewer pixels are averaged to generate the final image.

Arash,

How about various sampling method? Will it help to do less interpolation (e.g instead of bicubic, maybe, this is an extreme example, nearest neighbor) and add back loss of contrast with sharpening? I am not trying to say that we should do this because it doesn't solve the root cause of the problem (which is how the image was made in camera) but I am just wondering how these digital image processing method will result in the final image.

[Warren Spreng]

I agree that the last RP is the best, and terrific! Great BIF and great exposure!

[arash_hazeghi]

Arash,

How about various sampling method? Will it help to do less interpolation (e.g instead of bicubic, maybe, this is an extreme example, nearest neighbor) and add back loss of contrast with sharpening? I am not trying to say that we should do this because it doesn't solve the root cause of the problem (which is how the image was made in camera) but I am just wondering how these digital image processing method will result in the final image.

Hi Adhika, sampling method is indeed important, please always use Bicubic, other methods result it artifacts and make the image look worse. As you downsample the image will lose sharpness but you can recover it with smart sharpen filter very easily.

best

[arash_hazeghi]

BTW, all of this stuff is covered in depth in the post processing guide Artie and I spent almost a year putting together to help answer all of such qestions

brst

[Andrew Harrell]

Arash: Thanks for the enlightening comments. I can't upgrade cameras anytime soon, so guess I will work with what I have and try to get my shots as tack-sharp as possible (I have the same lens as Adhika, just the Sony version). Lots for me to work on -- ETTR, hand-holding technique, better focusing, etc ....

AP

[arash_hazeghi]

Hi Andrew, it's always better to work on your craft and get it right in the camera. Cropping isn't great, even if the IQ holds, most reputable photo competitions and publishers don't accept photos that have been cropped too much....

Cheers.

[Bob Miller]

Although I agree that tight cropping can degrade your image quality and one should be careful, I think both of your crops look fine to me. BTW one small dust spot missed 8 oclock on the left hand side