Hi David, I love all the nuthatches and it’s great to see this tiny guy. Nice pose, details and exposure. Interesting perch with a pleasing BG. Well done.
Very nice image of this little bird, David. To my eye there’s just the beginning of a smeared look to the plumage in places-did you use noise reduction on this?
A lovely find and a cute pose – he does look small. I’ve also never seen one, but that summer grass BG does look very familiar!! I think your processing has had a glitch somewhere, though. What @Dennis_Plank sees as some areas of soft plumage are, I think, areas of some sort of strange local tonal flatness. That camera and lens should give you top-notch files with a great dynamic range, but blacks look crushed here. I don’t know how you processed it but I would go back to the raw file and work scanning around the image at 100% after each step. I would simply lighten the darks to pull out detail, optimize the exposure for midtones and then tame whites as needed. Those 3 steps may be all you need, and then NR afterwards.
Then I would avoid any JPEG compression issues by exporting the JPEG at about 2000 px on the long side and set the highest JPEG compression I can to stay below the 2 MB limit here (or whatever the limit is – maybe someone can fill it in.)
I had a real Close look at this one and the shadows are just too noisy. Tried everything I could including DxO And Topaz but I don’t think it can be saved. This is such a cute little bird. The best shot was the one that may have been posted with this one was an editors choice several years ago. Thanks for your help on this. You’ve always been very helpful for me.
One thing that you might be able to do is to enhance the microcontrast in the feathers which could pull out additional details that were reduced from the noise reduction. Strong lighting is always a challenge and requires some delicate processing to get around noisy shadows. The nuthatch is vert nice and I hope that you run into this guy again when clouds produce a more favorable light. Well done…Jim
Really nice, David. I like the pose and the detail in the head and eye seem sharp to me. Very nice background and interesting perch. @SandyR-B, there not uncommon in Central Oregon, in areas such as Sisters or Sunriver.
