advice on post-processing some bird shots

[steve welle]

John, you are correct that I did some brightening. Not the overall exposure too much but the shadows mainly to get more attractive eyes. Also cranked up contrast and clarity sliders somewhat because shooting through windows that have not been cleaned in the winter made some of the shots hazy overall.

[steve welle]

Mark, interesting that you should mention using the lightroom brush for local adjustments. I was playing with that this afternoon before I saw your post. It seemed to me to work as well as the blur brush in photoshop elements for this purpose. The more I worked on these the more it appeared that, as suggested by Manfred, some of what I attributed to noise was pixelation.

[ajohnw]

John, you are correct that I did some brightening. Not the overall exposure too much but the shadows mainly to get more attractive eyes. Also cranked up contrast and clarity sliders somewhat because shooting through windows that have not been cleaned in the winter made some of the shots hazy overall.

You would probably do best with a brush for this as well as selectively removing noise. The package I use allows a curve to be brushed on. It also selects the area as it's brushed so the curve can be manipulated afterwards as well. Handy for final adjustments and spotting uneven brushing. Yours may do the same thing - I noticed by accident on the one I use on Linux.

Colin mentioned a method of local sharpening. 2 layers one sharpened one as is. Then brush the as is transparent where the sharpening is needed. I've not tried this but I suspect it is easier than selecting.

One other method of getting rid of a lot of noise is to use a noise filter to remove it at full size leaving it a little blurry and then reduce the size significantly and sharpen. Not so good on shots that need a heavy crop. I'm finding that aspect of small birds difficult. They never ever seem to come anywhere near filling the frame so I finish up working on what are near 100% resolution crops.

I have taken shots of birds through windows too. One was a thrush at 45 degrees. A refocus plug in helped with that but also introduced the same sort of noise your background has.

John
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