From this morning at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
I "curved" the low values up quite a bit, but now there seems to be a lot of noise going on. (ISO-100) I looked at it with the Noise Reduction tool in PhotoshopCS3, but I've never used that and it really didn't seem all that effective. Any suggestions?
An interesting shot. I do like the backlit blossoms in the foreground with the sunrays behind them. Anytime you shoot where you are getting area's that are very dark, you are going to end up with noise if you try to be too agressive in recovering detail from those area's. There just isn't much information left in those area's. The best way to handle this is to bracket when you shoot. Then blend those area's in.
Did you try to recover detail in the dark area's by just adjusting a curve? One thing you can try also is simply in your raw converter to overexpose the shot by one stop and save that image. Then overexpose it by 2 stops and save that image. Depending on whether you gained enough detail in the shadows, you can blend those in. It still won't be as good as just exposing for those area's in the first place by bracketing. 1 stop isn't bad in the raw converter, but by pushing 2 stops you can gain a bit of noise.
As to noise reduction. I use Noiseware now. It's a pretty good program that is both standalone, and a CS3 plugin. Others use Noise Ninja or some of the others, but quite a few of us now use Noiseware.
Thanks Jim and Simon, that is some very useful advice.
I shoot in RAW+JPEG, but just made this quickly from the JPEG. I'll remember that information about overexposing one stop -- I wish I had bracketted this...
And excellent advice, Simon, about cropping it into a square -- I think that would improve it a great deal.
