I have been struggling with this shot for the past few weeks. This one was taken late in the afternoon when the sun was quite bright but very low with a strong, warm tone to it. It shone on the bird but not the ground. I have taken to under exposing by a stop at these times because previously I have ended up with burned out areas of white on the bird. I am happy with the composition and framing and I like the overall feel of dusk.
The difficulty I have is dealing with the noise and sharpening of the owl, I have tried a number of approaches using Lightroom and Topaz (PhotoAI & NoNoise & Sharpen), and I have previously tried other proprietary tools such as DXO. However I’m left feeling that I’m probably up against it with the low light and quite a small sensor (micro-four thirds)… again!
Hi Ryan, I moved this post over to the Avian forum. I hope that’s okay.
In looking at your edited image, I’m not seeing much noise at all. Your post processing may be as well as can be expected in terms of noise. I think your settings may be adding to the issues in the image. 1/500s shutter speed is slow for birds in flight. I would think you could have shot a much higher ISO to gain faster shutter speed for the flying owl. Then still would have been able to effectively deal with any noise present. Plus looking at the image, I am wondering if the focus was more on the ground or fence. I’m not familiar with Panasonic cameras. Does this have animal/eye tracking capability?
I have had good results using DXO Pure Raw 3 in dealing with noise and maintaining sharpness. I have downloaded the RAW and will try editing it on my own to see if I get different results. @Dennis_Plank has had good success using DXO PureRaw 4 and may have other thoughts. I’ll let you know what I come up with on my end.
Ryan, my attempt is below. I used DXO PureRaw 3 and then Photoshop. Raised exposure and then selectively sharpened the owl using Smart Sharpen. Not sure there is much difference in our versions. I think the wing blur is from the slow shutter speed but wing blur is not necessarily a bad thing at all. The head of the owl should be pretty sharp however. I think significant improvement beyond this will most likely be from different settings in the field (higher shutter speed and ISO) but others may have different thoughts.
