Angry lil chickadee

[Jake Levin]

Back at the feeder/perch set-up at the local park, during the regular swarms of chickadees that come to grab a seed and/or sit on the stick waiting their turn, this guy decided another bird (not in frame, lower on the perch) was too close for comfort.


7D mkII, 500mm f/4 IS
1/400 @ f/6.3, ISO 800
ACR/PS, some added brightness in general and around the eye, masking off the white cheeks to keep from toasting them. It needs noise reduction but I still have to figure out how to work neatimage.

Once again my standard 1200x800 jpeg was too big for reasons not quite clear to me, so this upload is 1050 wide.

Thanks for looking,
Jake

[John Mack]

Love the diagonal perch here exposure looks good. Wish the birds head was facing the other way.

[Glenn Pure]

Great pose and composition with that diagonal perch. The bird looks soft to me though - not sure what is going on there. How does the RAW look? Colour and tone look beautifully rendered. Worth another go at this one, I think, if that detail can be recovered.

[Jake Levin]

That's strange. Everything looks perfect on the RAW file (touch wood). I'm not sure why my jpeg files are coming out sharp for some and not for others, but it's clearly happening, and with files that don't show any softness in RAW form to boot....and I'm like a hawk with sharpness, just ask Artie! Could it be that I just need to adjust the output sharpening when I do a "save for web" file in Photoshop?

Edited to add a 100% crop, unsharpened, of a portion of the RAW file fine feather detail.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Nice one Jake, very much like our coal tit - which coincidentally I have been trying to capture. Exposure and colours spot on.
Feathers on the second image look sharp are the ones around the eye and bill equally so?
When you said file was too big at 1200px by 800px did you mean it was greater than 400k? When you have your resized image in Save for Web do you go top right and click the drop down to make an image 390-395k this will maximise image size, i.e. file size.

[Jake Levin]

Here's the head at 100%. It's noisy, due to the zoom and the fact that I haven't noise reduced the file yet, but it still seems sharp.

Yes, I meant that the file kept coming out larger than 400k. I wasn't aware that you could set a limit on the file size, but it sounds like I should be doing that!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Yes, I meant that the file kept coming out larger than 400k. I wasn't aware that you could set a limit on the file size, but it sounds like I should be doing that![/QUOTE]
Good glad to be of help, also ensure Convert to SRGB is ticked.

[Glenn Pure]

Jake, the sharpness on the RAW looks excellent so there's something in your workflow that is producing softer final result. What are you doing for your output sharpening as I'd look there first. Getting that right makes a big difference.

[Jake Levin]

How does this look in comparison? Tweaked the sharpness and got rid of the noise.

[Stuart Edwards]

That looks a lot better Jake even on my really crappy laptop here at work .

[Glenn Pure]

Yes, that's fixed it. Great work and really made this into a delightful image.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Agreed - looks great now!