General C and C appreciated.
Also, comments about PS work. This image was "rescued" from under-exposure, inadvertently set by me. Among other things, I struggled to reduce noise, without a noise reduction plug-in.
Feel free to play, repost.
Thx.
Scott G
exposure ~ +2.75 in ACR
NR through NeatImage,
Curves,
TLR Digital Velvia Action
Smart Objects - sharpen & selective blur for BG
'bout out of time for tonight - thought I noticed a color shift when saving to jpg - eyes aren't what the used to be but I think CS3 is a POC for jpg conversions anyway - neever get what I saw (probably my doing)
I don't know...I kind of like the original PP better. The other is a little too orange for me, but I DO like the difference in contrast that the edit made. Seems noise reduction was more successful in the first version. Great capture!
Yes, the edit is perhaps a bit hot - probably a result of the Velvia action. And on this monitor, which is a poor basis for judgment, there is way too much orange.
Bob,
Thank for the time and effort. I love the sharpness, and think I need to bump it on my image. I dont have CS2 or 3, so I'll work more with CS and LR. A bit brigther than mine; I think I prefer yours. Colors are, however, off a bit. Did you convert to sRGB?
Curious what others think of the variations, and maybe some other re-works as well....
Scott G
Cathy,
thanks.
I worked hard on the noise reduction, selection background, applying gaussian blur, healing a bit of the color variation. It's weird, and maybe others know more about this: On high ISO or heavily "recovered" issues, there are vertical bands of noise. It reminds me of the old Etch-a-Sketch drawing tool. If anyone recalls it. Once you cover the enter surface with etching, you see thru to the workings below. Its as if the sensor defects show directly.
Thanks, srapson. Actually it was taken with a long lens; 100-400IS @f 4.5 with trees far in the background. The original does look blurred. I attempted to reduce noise further by adding additional blur to the background, smoothing out some uneven-ness in the color (specks of red, esp).
Nice image, Scott. I'm liking the softness of the feathers in your post - some sharpening could me made, but don't lose that softness (IMHO, of course) Composition wise, I find that the forground, bright, colored feathers compete with the eye for my attention. The eye, along with the beak and head, wins, but I still feel the pull of the feathers. Since I settled on the eye, and head, the portrait crop now competes with that. Here's a landscape crop - without the pull of the feathers.
Bob, Alan,
Thanks for lending your eyes and talents to the image. Color is more accurate in these re-works.
I'm curious what others think about the landscape crop.
Scott G
Scott, you need to get a NR program such as Neat Image Pro.
Bob, I take it that you worked with the raw image. It looks to me like there is still too much noise in it. Neat Image Pro should be able to remove more of the very low frequency blotchiness than you achieved, but you need to tick the appropriate box as an option.
I like the landscape image because the bottom part of the original was not sharp enough compared to the rest. However, I do not like the high contrast look (perhaps too much sharpening on the fine details) as it seems rather unnatural. At first the appearance of the bird's neck looked a bit odd but it was that way in the original too.
I use NI Pro but am not familiar enough with it to really fine tune it. Yes, Scott provided the RAW file, I stayed with CS3 although although I'd really like to work on it with Capture NX but that doesn't seem to want to read Canon files
