Spotted Owl

[pankajratna]

Friends, not sure on couple of things here:

- Feather details seems to be lost due to Noise Reduction
- Other images pics in the forum are always tack sharp, what can be the issue here?
- background...again never seem to find birds in a good creamy background...frustrating

f/7.1 400mm, ISO 400, Canon 50D, 400mm F/5.6

Cheers

Pankaj

[John Chardine]

Hi Pankaj- This image has a lot of potential. I like the unusual crop. Eye contact is obviously excellent! There are a few adjustments you could make to improve the image. What comes to mind right away is that the owl is too dark in relation to the BG. In these cases it's better to expose for the subject and let the BG do what it likes, which in this case will be to blow because of the bright highlights. To correct the image in post -processing there are a couple of methods in Photoshop (Ps). The best one is to up the Fill light in ACR and adjust the exposure so that you are happy with the subject. Here, I used Shadows and Highlights in the Ps. Also ran another round of sharpening.

You ask about detail in the feathers and NR. If you run NR on the subject you do run the risk of reducing detail. There's not easy way out of this I'm afraid. If you had exposed the subject properly, there would not have been much noise. With it being underexposed, the noise is produced. Regarding backgrounds there is no easy answer! Just try to choose locations with good BGs, use large apertures to reduce depth of field and blur the BG, and position yourself so that the BGs are pleasing. There are some things you can do to minimise the effect of this BG. Try evening out the tones with the clone brush, and try using the blur filter after first masking out the bird.

[Cody Covey]

John pretty much covered the issues with noise. Unfortunately underexposing and trying to recover it in post will always add some noise. The bird is very pretty and the HA is nice with the owl looking directly at you. I really need to find some owls around here but haven't had luck as of yet!

[Sid Garige]

Pankaj,

What metering method did you use for this? Evaluate/spot

-sid

[pankajratna]

Thanks John, understood and your PP looks good. I guess I should be trying couple of variations myself during PP.

When you say the correct exposure would have reduced the noise, is it because then there is no need to increase the exposure and introduce noise? With this background I was unable to decide if I was exposing correctly for the right ETTR.

Hi Sid, I was using evaluative.

Thanks and much appreciated

Pankaj

[Desmond Chan]

When you say the correct exposure would have reduced the noise, is it because then there is no need to increase the exposure and introduce noise?

I'll let John answer if correct exposure would reduce noise. I would like to say though that if you want to increase the brightness of an under-exposed area in a photograph during post-processing, you will enhance the noise in that area.

With this background I was unable to decide if I was exposing correctly for the right ETTR.

Your should have based the exposure on getting the correcting exposure of the main subject. "Exposing-to-the-right" would not help you in this scenario.

Or you can add fill-flash.