First Birds with K20

[Trojansoc]

vIZnquest wrote:

The first two though appear to be heavily cropped and some noise reduction used. The first one has alot of lost detail.

Tom, I went back this morning to the original files and looked again at the crops and processing. The first shot was simply too much of a crop to be effective. On the second one, I had plent of image left to work with after the crop (1451 X 1364). There was a slight amount of noise, but not so much as to significantly affect image detail. I re-edited with no noise reduction...just a little Curves and USM.



See what you think. I think the lesson I'm seeing on the K20 is that I have to be far more judicious in my use of noise reduction software. I was a little disappointed, though, in the amount of noise present in the original shot at ISO 1600. I expected a little better than this at that ISO.

Paul

[JohnG]

Trojansoc wrote:

There was a slight amount of noise, but not so much as to significantly affect image detail. I re-edited with no noise reduction...just a little Curves and USM.

With respect Paul - I disagree. For birds that amount of noise destroys a significant amount of detail. Humans are easier - we don't have feathers - especially kids - features are smooth, not a lot of muscle tone / veins / ligaments etc. Of course there are exceptions.

But independent of what the camera is - that's a lot of noise for a bird picture. It's why some of the more serious birders use flash and better beamer so they can stay at lower ISOs. Just my .02