Canon 7D
Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L
1/1600 f/5.6 ISO 500 HH
Levels and Sharpening in CS5
Cloned a a tiny bit of junk on his beak and a little twig below
Yet another Anna's
Canon 7D
Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L
1/1600 f/5.6 ISO 500 HH
Levels and Sharpening in CS5
Cloned a a tiny bit of junk on his beak and a little twig below
OK Ian, you have hit the big leagues here. Absolutely love this one. The image is perfectly sharp, the perch is perfect, the BG is pretty darn good (maybe lighten the top left portion to even out?). And what a superb subject. I might consider a slight variation on this crop with a bit more room given to the top and a bit less to the bottom. The right-left room is perfect.
Finally, I will comment on the overall image quality which is great. I have noticed with many of your previous images that they are not as sharp as I would expect from the hardware. This one is, so you need to figure out what you did with this one and use as a model.
I did see a bit of noise in parts of the image but this would be easy to remove. Overall a great image in my opinion.
Last edited by John Chardine; 03-09-2011 at 05:43 PM.
Wow, John, thank you! I was pretty happy with it too. I do see the bit of noise, but I'm always afraid of running NR on the bird itself as I always seem to mudden the subject. I'd love to know if there is a way around that.
As for the sharpness, I finally got around to MA'ing my lens a couple of weeks ago and it was a bit off. I guess that shows!
I'll play with the crop a little and try lightening that corner and see what it does.
There's no easy way around it Ian. I resort to occasionally is to use the blur brush to reduce obvious noise in areas of the image, but I make sure I don't brush over detail. In this image you could zoom in on the tail and use a small blur brush. There's not a lot of detail there to begin with so you won't lose much. It's amazing how a smooth eye goes a long way to the feeling of a low-noise image. If needed I will zoom into the eye and smooth/blur the iris, again making sure I don't blur contours like that between the iris and the pupil or eyelid. Also, I use the Topaz suite of filters and their Denoise does a great job of reducing noise and not reducing detail. It figures out where the detail is and avoids it at small (but adjustable) scales.
WOW!! What an amazing image. Beautiful looking bird, nice detail, great eye contact. Great background and perfect perch. Well done.
Super image, Ian! Great colors and detail, pose and perch. I agree that there is a little noise. Sometimes I will run NR on the subject with a 0-2 setting on luminance and a high color setting. I like John's method an will give that a try.
Peter
I love this image. Spring is coming and I should try doing some hummer photos.
Ian, I think this is probably the best image I have seen you post here (or there...). Truly excellent. As for the noise reduction, I almost always do it on the individual channels as each channel has different levels of noise and I do it applying a surface blur. This leaves the edges alone and affects only the smooth areas. But even then I apply it selectively as described by John, with the mask set to black and then painting it in where needed. But if there's a lot of noise I struggle with it too...
But again, beautifully done!
Thank you so much, everyone
Wow! Everything looks good in this photo. Congratulations on this one!
Congrats Ian. Incredible feather detail!
Super work Ian. Can't add much to the thumbs up, but I might add that this image would be pretty easy to make a separate layer with just the bg. Topaz Remask3 would make this really easy, but you could also use the selection tools in CS5. Your selection around the edges wouldn't have to be perfect as all you would be doing is running NR on the bg. You can also use a layer mask and just paint out areas that got de-noised inadvertently. Super job.
"It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson
Please visit me on the web at http://kerryperkinsphotography.com
nice pic!
Seeing that there is very little in the background to cause distractions I think you could probably have used a smaller aperture and given up some shutter speed to get greater DOF...
I think you could probably could have captured the entire bird in focus instead of the tail feathers going soft.
I agree with lightening the upper left corner, mostly because the rest of the background is so even.
Posting Permissions
