Northern Cardinal female

[Bill Dix]

Still in the back yard, practicing with the a1 and its bird eye AF. Large crop.

a1, Sony 200-600, ISO 2000, 1/3200s @ f/6,3

[Dorian Anderson]

Excellent action. What's weird is there's a lot noise on the bird but zero on the BG. You'll need to reconcile that somehow. But it looks like you have the AF working well, so that's good!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Nicely caught Bill the bird looks to be in pretty good focus and the action well caught.
I would suggest a smaller crop, I appreciate your files are large but I would suggest cropping as a last resort as opposed to first, as mentioned previously noise is apparent.
The green background appears rather vivid/bold to me, that is the way I see it, I appreciate you may have a contradictory opinion.

[Randy Stout]

Bill:

Dramatic action, not an easy pose to capture. Do agree about the interesting mix of noisy bird and quiet background. Don't see any obvious masking signs, so not sure why. How much did you have to lift the exposure, if any?

Cheers

Randy

[Bill Dix]

Thank you all. I did notice the noise on the bird, but now that I look at it with fresh eyes and your help, I realize it is worse than I originally thought. I ran DeNoise AI separately on BG and bird, and didn't want to overdo the latter, but should have pushed it further.. Randy, I didn't lift the overall exposure, but I did lift the shadows on the bird using PP s/h. Tight crop was to crop out a rather unattractive feeder that she was about to land on.

[Randy Stout]

Bill:

I don't know what settings you use in DeNoise, but I have been generally quite pleased with the RAW noise reduction setting. You are supposed to use it before any adjustments in LR or PS for that matter. I take the raw file in question straight out of the camera, into Denoise and apply the RAW setting in DeNoise. It seems to give excellent NR with little damage to the detail. Perhaps worth a try.

Randy

[arash_hazeghi]

nice pose but the image is very noisy, you can benefit from working on PP.

TFS

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Bill a very cool and striking capture ... but the IQ is off for me .
Would like to see revised version ... wonder if you can produce a better result . And if this is a large crop .... I would rather choose a looser crop .

TFS Andreas