Tui cloned to reduce artefacts.

[Ian McHenry]

Much as I love the challenge of photographing birds in their natural setting one thing that bugs me is the dreaded artifacts. Have cloned this recent image of a Tui taken while on holiday to reduce artifacts, But is there a better way???? Image Details: Pentax K10D with Tamron 70-300 @ 110mm. Mid morning 10AM 400 ISO. 1/45 sec @ F5.6 Minus 0.5EV Multi segment metering. Fairly significant crop. All suggestions & reposts appreciated. Will post the uncloned version next. Thanks: Ian Mc

[Kerry Perkins]

Ian, if you are talking about the noise and random artifacts induced by large crops there isn't much you can do about them. What exactly did you clone out? There is a significant amount of noise in this image and a loss of detail due to too few pixels on the bird. The only remedy for this is to get closer to the bird next time. The very bright white area above the bill is very distracting.

[Ian McHenry]

And here is the uncloned version.
Cheers: Ian Mc

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Kerry
In the first clone I cloned bill to remove purple cast, also spot on tree and part in bright white area.
Have now cloned out much of the distracting white bg.
Cheers: Ian Mc

[Petros Petrou]

Hi Ian. It was a nice try but the result is not that natural. Try to decrease the hardness of the brush tool used for cloning to about 50%. In order to protect the bird from painting, I suggest you to make a large selection of the area that you want to paint. Work in 200%-300% magnification because your selection must be accurate in order to avoid painting the bird. Use the Polygonal Lasso tool or the Magnetic Lasso tool putting a value 1 or 2 to the feather value. Using the above technique the area cloned will blend more naturally with the rest of the picture.
I agree with the other points noted from Kerry above.
Good Luck.

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Petros
Appreciate your comprehensive advice.
Had decided to go with a Topaz Clean preset "Stylize"
Here is result.
Cheers: Ian Mc

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Ian,

As you have seen, post productions can only do so much. In this case, the crop was too large to keep detail and make the image critically sharp. Looks like it might be underexposed as well (how did histogram look). When we try and lighten these images more noise is introduced. On balance, the artifacts were part of the crop process/post adjustments, been there myself. As stated, get it corrected in the field. Thanks for sharing and asking questions, good back and forth.

Nice adjustment with the "stylize" format.

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Jeff These birds are a bit tricky to photograph as they move on pretty quick, so as on holiday did not check histogram at the time !!! However h'gram not too bad but there is a narrow peak on right hand end. Here is original image resized but otherwise unedited. Cheers: Ian Mc

[Kerry Perkins]

Ian, the two major problems with your capture are the underexposure of the bird and the busy environment, which caused you to crop heavily to isolate the head and upper body. Your camera exposed for the bright sky in the background (the spike on the right of your histogram) and left the bird in the dark. You really needed a positive EV here, not negative, as the sky is already blown out and you have to concentrate on the subject. Cropping this heavily on an underexposed image leads to even more noise, which can't be controlled much because it is hard to distinguish from the desired details.

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks Kerry Appreciate your continued interest & advice. It seems that when on holiday with unfamiliar birds suddenly coming within camera range it might be a good idea to preset the camera @ spot metering instead of my usual multi segment metering. More particularly in tree and bush areas? Cheers: Ian Mc

[John Chardine]

Hi Ian- A challenging image to do much with, as mentioned above. A great bird though and a huge treat to see such an iconic endemic from NZ. Re. the uncloned version of the image, you are seeing chromatic aberration in the form of the magenta halo that spilled over onto the bill. In Photoshop, there are ways to remove or at least reduce this problem (look at the Lens correction filter). An alternative is to use the Sponge tool to desaturate the magenta fringe. There are ways to remove the bright white spot but you will have to cleverly mask out the bill and feather detail and use soft tools so that you don't get that hard-edged effect you see in pane 4. I like the OOTB look of pane 6 but I would redo the white spot removal and then run the Topaz filter again. Consider then posting to OOTB?

[Ian McHenry]

Thanks John I'm still battling to get familiarity with PSE but may have a stab @ Topaz Remask and see how i go. Cheers: Ian Mc