Wednesday, 25 January 2012

High ISO Greenfinch

I spent much of the day yesterday shooting at the feeding station in the rain. Light was, as you'd expect, minimal yet I wanted to shoot with a high enough shutter speed so that the falling rain drops didn't appear too long and streaky in the final image. I also wanted to shoot at f7.1 one for a reasonable depth of field. This all meant that I had to dial in iso1600 (now I know Nikon users will be going Pah! That's nothing! but I'm on a Mark 3 canon where it can be an issue when shooting for stock).

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700mm f7.1 1/160 iso1600
Full frame



In this situation my approach to getting a marketable file is thus:

Get the exposure cock-on when you take the shot, over-expose if anything but you don't want to end up having to push the RAW file and introducing even more noise as you're on a slippery slope then.
In Lightroom I only drag the luminance noise slider up to 15 and the detail slider to 70. I'm not interested in cleaning up the background I just want to tidy up the subject a little.
After exporting the resultant tiff to Photoshop I make a selection of the background and go to work on this with the Noise Ninja plug-in.
The resultant image is, as you can see from the close crop, clean and detailed and good to go.

Crop

More rainy day shots tomorrow.
Posted by at 11:16
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2 comments:

  1. Thank you for a most informative post Simon. The processing, along with the photography, for that matter is very new to me, so advice as to how the pros do it is always useful. Top-drawer resultant image.

    Can I ask you this? I download my RAW files to Iphoto, then export them as TIFF so that I can process them in Photoshop Elements 4.

    Is this the right thing to do?

    Many thanks

    Christian

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  2. Cheers Christian.
    I'd recommend using a dedicated program like Lightroom for importing and processing your raw files. Photoshop should just be for adding the finishing touches to an image with localized adjustments, global adjustments are best done in Lightroom to preserve detail. Remember to export your tiffs as 16bit, make your adjustments and then convert to 8bit, as this will also better preserve detail.
    Having said that, I've no idea what iPhoto's like!

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