The photographer has shared comprehensive information about their intent and creative vision for this image. Please examine the details and offer feedback on how they can most effectively realize their vision.
Self Critique
What I like is the colors and the bird at sunset with the starfish, and the water draining from it. Where I have the problem is that the heron is so grainy. Is there any hope to salvage this image?
Creative direction
I wanted to be able to get some detail in the bird rather than a dark silhouette.
Specific Feedback
This is new to me, so I don’t have specifics and am open to any suggestions.
Technical Details
I did use lightroom AI noise reduction. I am relatively new with my 200-600mm lens and set F stop to 6.3 and shutter to 1/2000 to stop action as I was not too proficient at holding the lens still yet. Sony A7riv.
Description
I was sitting on the beach at low tide and sunset, facing the sun. Shore birds tend to feed here. This great blue heron was close by and was actively feeding. I kept my camera on him/her and shot off several frames each time the head went into the water and this was my result.
Hi Kathryn. Welcome to NPN and the Avian forum. First, I love the composition, the water and the starfish (and the punny title). The graininess of the heron may be salvageable and when viewed from a reasonable distance, probably wouldn’t show up much. You said you used the LR AI noise reduction and the background looks fine. Did you bring the exposure on the heron up after that? That would tend to amplify the noise in it and you might get somewhere by running another round of noise reduction in Photoshop. I also think you could go a little darker on the heron, which would reduce the issue (you’d have to go back to where you brightened it in the first place to make it work).
There are a couple of ways of dealing with this situation in the field. The first is to expose for as bright an image as possible without blowing out the brightest area. On the A7Riv, you can set the zebras for overexposure to show up at different levels and I tend to go with 100% or a bit higher since it’s working off a jpeg version of the image and the RAW image has more range. That will give you the least noise in the image and you can always reduce brightness in processing easier than raising it.
The second method is to shoot in the exposure bracketing mode and merge two images. In the bad old days, that would be problematic for an action image, but with 20 frames/second I think you could pull it off for an image like this.
I hope this made some sense and I look forward to seeing a lot more of your work.
Welcome to NPN. You took a very nice shot of this Heron. The colors in the water are beautiful and I love the starfish catch. It makes for a unique shot.
You didn’t mention your ISO settings, but being that this was shot in the evening with low light, I would assume the ISO was fairly high. The new noise reduction in LR is much better than it use to be, but most likely not good enough to take our extreme noise. I use a program called Topaz Photo AI. It comes as a bundle with Sharpen AI, Noise AI and Gigapixel AI. Sharpen AI, Noise AI and Gigapixel AI are the older versions and I assume will be fazed out in the future. The new version Topaz Photo AI contains all the capabilities as the older versions. Topaz has been working on the new Topaz Photo AI now for about a year and constantly come out with new updates to improve it. Many photographers use this software. Unfortunately, there is an annual cost for this program if you want to continue getting new updates that come out after you’ve owned it for a year. If you don’t want the updates the one you purchased is yours to keep. It comes with a hefty price of about $200 for the first year and then $79.00 after that. They offer a free full month trial and often put this package on sale. It’s fairly easy to use and does a wonderful job on everything it does. There are many YouTube videos that will help you learn it. You can read about it at Topazlabs.com.
I took your photo and used Topaz Photo AI on the Heron to denoise and sharpen. I denoised the whole image and sharpened the Heron. The program has mask abilities for sharpening. It tries to automatically select your subject. Sometimes it works and sometimes not so good, but you can add to the mask and subtract from the mask to sharpen what you want. If you’re interested in this program, try the trial first to make sure it’s worth the money for you. There are other good programs that do this too, but all of them will cost you.
Hope this helps. If you need any help with this, I’d be happy to answer questions as anyone else on NPN would too. @Dennis_Plank gave great advice on things to check that might take care of the problem without using other software.
Thank you so much for accolades and your tips. I did crop the shot and bring up the exposure on the heron after the LR AI noise reduction. I haven’t mastered Photoshop yet, but I will have a go at it and darken the heron a bit. Since taking this photo, I have learned about the zebra stripes and will pay attention to them in the future, along with my histogram. I never thought about bracketing wildlife, but it might be worth a try. Thank you for the idea. I appreciate your suggestions.
Thank you Donna for your warm welcome and kind words regarding my photo. I have heard of Topaz and read a lot of reviews with comparisons to Lightroom’s new AI. Most of the reviews I read felt that, for the most part, Lightroom did just as good a job as Topaz so I had not looked any further into it. From what you are saying it sounds like you would have much more control over where the sharpening was being applied. I can see how that could be of value. Thank you for the tip.
Hi Kathryn, Welcome to NPN! What a great catch of the heron getting the starfish. And I was expecting more noise on the heron in your post when I enlarged it. Could be better I know but I’ve seen a lot worse . I’ll throw in that the tool I used for processing high ISO images is DXO Pure Raw 3. Works very well for me. Love the mood of the photo and the light on the water is great.
What a beautiful photo. Capturing the starfish and the water dropping off of it is brilliant. This has a very “fine art” style which I appreciate. I think your landscape experience brings a lot to your wildlife work. I am only using Lightroom right now for processing, including noise. I too wouldn’t mind the bird being a bit darker and the crop slightly looser if that helped the slight noise. To me, the starfish is the real subject.
. I’ll throw in that the tool I used for processing high ISO images is DXO Pure Raw 3. Works very well for me. Love the mood of the photo and the light on the water is great.