-
Too Much?
This is the same little silver gull as the previous posts. Heavy clouds and sea mist. I found this an interesting one to process and I'm not sure how folks will take to the processing. The image is plagued with noise that no amount of Dfine-ing will help. It was just an image I liked and would like to save from the "recycle bin". Any hints appreciated.
In ACR - Exposure to the right, Contrast to the right. Highlights left. Shadows right and whites right.
In PSCS6 - Define over whole image, water and lower feathers smart sharpened for posting.
Canon 5D2
Sigma 150-600mm @ 600mm
f8 @ 1/1000
ISO 1000
Hand Held
C&C Always appreciated and welcomed!
-
That's how my histogram looked like on my Mt Rainier picture, Glennie. I find it really tough to work with such histogram. How much can I push it before I push it too far? I think you did well handling the whites but I am wondering if a very high key artistic image would work here, too? I will still work on the blacks for this one, though. In my mind, what lacks in color should be made up by tonality. In my monitor it lacks contrast and I think the histogram shows it too with nothing on the pure black channel. Have you considered shifting the black end of the curve to give it more contrast? That said, I am very inclined to see this processed artistically, maybe with the bird slightly smaller in the frame - minimalist style, so to speak.
-
You have a very lovely high-key image here! I'd crop a little from the top as the reflection is almost as weighted as the bird. I love the range of light tones, and can't see the noise but I believe you.
This was the classic case for ETTR. The subject and BG should be rendered in light tones, but the camera will expose any scene as an average exposure unless you have offset the exposure. Very underexposed values will become noisy when pushed to the right, so you want to do it in camera, to get the best exposure. It becomes pretty easy after a while to look at a scene like that and guess at an exposure compensation of as much as +2. Then a glance at the histogram to see if a tweak is needed.
Set zero exposure compensation and point a camera at a solid white card in full sun and it will give you a gray image. Do the same with a black card and it will give you the same gray image. If you have overlapped cards, so the field of view is half white and half black, it should find a middle exposure and give white whites and black blacks. The theory is that most scenes will have a range of tones, but when one doesn't we need to compensate. Then you will get clean tones and when you stretch the darkest tones down they won't be noisy.
As to the noise, you might go straight from the raw file, with no adjustments, into PS and see if Dfine will work then. It didn't work before because it didn't find enough areas of noise but otherwise smooth detail to build a profile. If it works on the original file, then have the adjusted one also open and run the same filter straight on it -- from the top of the filter menu. That will just duplicate the same profile and may work. I've never thought to try that -- interested to see if it would -- report back!
-
I think you've saved it from the Recycle Bin, but I wondered about a different approach that would add a bit of depth and make the gull contrast more with the sky.
Because of the conditions when you captured this, heavy clouds and mist, I wondered about adding fog and not worrying about noise. The first step was Color Efex Fog (#3, I think) with Multiply blend mode and reduced opacity. A masked Curves layer with a narrow gradient was used to darken the water. In order to vary the tonality of mostly the sky but also the water, I used Color Efex Darken/Lighten Center (actually the inverse of that and with the location centered near the gull's neck). That layer was, then, masked off the gull. Following that were a layer of Gaussian mono noise (sky only), Curves Strong Contrast masked to affect the sky and -- to a much lesser extent -- the gull, and Camera Raw Filter to reduce the Saturation and increase the Luminance of the orange in the water. The last step was a small crop from the right.
All that pretty much left the gull the way you'd processed it but modified the rest.
Last edited by Dennis Bishop; 07-10-2016 at 02:37 PM.
-
This approach works, too. It has emphasized the ripples near the left edge, though, and if it were mine, I'd prefer to see the contrast lightened there.
-
-
I think on criterion of a strong image is that it can be interpreted in a range of ways.
Glad I was able to make that suggestion -- it's an approach I never thought of before. And, ironically, if you had exposed to the right it wouldn't have worked.
One of the nicest things about ETL is the challenges!
-
I love being a challenge!
-
Publisher
Lots of great stuff above. I actually like the tonality of the image in Pane #1 best. But the most important thing to come out of this is that in order to reduce noise you need to expose as far to the right as possible so that the image on the back of the camera looks totally washed out (assuming that you are using RAW capture).
I beat that point home on my blog several times each week. Check out the histogram in the Sometimes When It's Supposed to Suck... Part II: ETTR, Canon EOS 5DS R for Flight, & 100-400 II Versatility blog post here.
Everyone here should subscribe to my blog: great free lessons virtually every day of the year.
BTW, I love the image--the image design, the high key look, and that neat bird. I love gulls. What is the gull species?
a
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
BIRDS AS ART Online Store: we will not sell you junk. 35 years of long lens experience. Please e-mail with gear questions.
Check out the new SONY e-Guide and videos that I did with Patrick Sparkman here. Ten percent discount for BPN members,
E-mail me at samandmayasgrandpa@att.net.
-
Super Moderator
good comments above, I also like the 1st image by far, the whites are pure white in the original, in the reposts they are grey. the original image was underexposed and hence the noise, you want to the histogram to be all the way to high right. not in the middle
what type of exposure where you using?
-
Artie - Thank you! I do subscribe to your blog and it is read every day. The gull species is Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae or Silver Gull. This one is young. Eventually his eye rim, legs and beak will turn to bright red. I have posted an adult a little while back.
Arash - Thank you. This has been a good thread for me. I was using Manual Exposure. The techs are with the OP.
-
Post a Thank You. - 1 Thanks
-
Super Moderator
if you use manual you can use the exposure meter in the finder as a guide line, for this scene, 2.5 stops above the mid point should do the trick
-
Thank you Arash. I try to use the meter finder most of the time. I didn't think I could squeeze much more out of the techs.
-
Glennie I like the way the colour of the water here progresses from very light grey to a white grey as one looks right to left, just as it does in the bird itself, albeit more dramatically on the bird. I also like that in the RP you have preserved and perhaps even enhanced to some degree the overall whiteness that makes the image so striking. I am intrigued by the pink tones in the water around the bird and on the throat of the reflection. It relates nicely to the beak colour but there seems more of it than could arise from just being picked up off the beak?
In your repost the ripply features in the water are smoothed out in a lovely way that I think complements the overall tone of the image, I assume having been achieved through the NR, but I feel that softening has spilled over too much onto the grey wing (and even to a lesser extent to the fluffy white feathering below the wing), causing an unfortunate loss of the fine feather detail. I suspect that through the wizardry of selective masking during the NR procedures that outcome could be avoided, although that would be beyond my humble PP abilities at the moment.
This is a nicely conceived image that not only gently portrays this fine fellow but recreates the softly moody aura of a quiet foggy sea. And thank you for posting the histogram, for therein, as pointed out by Arthur and Arash, lies the important lesson to be learned from this image, one that I had not yet appreciated for a subject of this tonality in these lighting conditions.
-
Thank you Bob! You are most observant.
The pink tones in the water is actually the colour of the tannum in the freshwater stream that had pushed it's way out to the sea after a huge storm. So I got lucky.
I see what you mean about the ripples. Yes. I like the reposts ripples better, smoother. Yes. It would have been from the NR. Bob, this image was so noisy; although posted here it doesn't look too bad. And yes. I could have masked the bird.
I have learnt a lot from the histogram.
