Originally Posted by
Nicola
Dave,
now I can see how the picture is underexposed,
IMHO, the lack of information on the right side of the histogram you show me (= underexposure) could be the cause of the noise. Even if there are not withe spots in the picture, I think about +1 stop of exposure could be of help to reduce the noise in this case.
anyway, did you used the noise reduction tool in ACR? I think you can improve the picture moving the "luminance" slider of the noise reduction tool to the right end, and then work on sharpening with about 0,7 radius - 100 amount (always in ACR) to "restore" some details
in addiction, in Photoshop you can create a mask for the bird, then apply a severe noise reduction only on the grass, and finally sharpen again the whole image: the noise on the bird is less visible than on the blurred grass , because of the details on the plumes