Taken in Poquoson, VA. Sony A700-70-400G, f5.6, 1/1000, iso800, -0.3ec
PP in PSE8, crop, levels, curves, usm. Painted over some bright spots in the water with a soft brush
Cormorant
Taken in Poquoson, VA. Sony A700-70-400G, f5.6, 1/1000, iso800, -0.3ec
PP in PSE8, crop, levels, curves, usm. Painted over some bright spots in the water with a soft brush
I like the bird's position and the colors, but I think you might have been forced to crop too hard. There seems to be an awful lot of noise in the body feathers.
Originally Posted by Paul Guris
I agree with with Paul. You might want to recrop this image and hit it with some noise reduction.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to make it unanimous on the noise issue - can you post the entire original and let me have a look at it? I'd like to see if we can get you a decent crop and still keep that noise down.
Nice body angle and pose...and I like what you did with the water.
Peter, you didn't seriously underexpose this image and try to lighten it in post-processing did you? Why did you use a negative exposure compensation? Also, at what point are you using USM? regards~Bill
Julie, As you requested here is the original. I opened it in ACR, used the recovery slider to reduce blown highlights on the bill and slid the clarity slider to 30.
Bill, Image was not underexposed. I used negative EC to reduce highlights in the water and USM was used after resizing image prior to saving for web.
Peter
Large crops always have a negative effect on image quality, and it looks similar to other problems, like noise brought out by an underexposed image being lightened in post-processing, or noise as a by product of sharpening.
It is often difficult to ascertain how much cropping you are doing to an image by just looking at it. I was somewhat surprised when I ran the numbers for this image, it is cropped more than I thought. I've included your image with calculations using image size, as opposed to dimensions, to determine amount of cropping. You've cropped 78.1% of the image. I suggest no more than 30%. regards~Bill
Last edited by WIlliam Maroldo; 12-14-2010 at 11:08 PM.
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