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Technical Details
Shot at dusk with my Sigma 100-400 zoom lens. ISO2500, f6.3, 1/1250. I applied noise reduction in LR but this is good as I could get without it looking to smooth and unnatural.
A great singing pose, Veda. Noise reduction on dark birds can be a real pain. I know several people, including some on this site that have great success with the LR AI noise reduction. Personally, I think DxO PureRaw does a better job, but it seems to depend also on the particular image.
Aside from noise reduction, I would back off on the of the blacks. We often get remarks about showing more detail, but to me, a black bird should look black and not gray. That may make the head blocked up and pure black, but if you select the bird in LR and then subtract the head from the selection, you can work on the rest of the bird with impunity. I really like the brilliant epaulet and the composition works very well.
Well done, Veda. Good singing pose and the epaulets pop nicely. Very pleasing background as well. Another voted for DxO. In addition to good NR, it also seems to sharpen the image a bit.
The image does suffer from noise and loss of detail. My guess is that this may actually result from a heavy crop? I use the noise reduction feature in Lightroom and it works very well. One way to recover blacks that are grayed out is to use a curve adjustment which can increase contrast in the image. The pose and BG are very nice and I would go back to the RAW file and re-process the image…Jim
