Which is better?

[Ian]

I was blessed with a hoopoe visiting this afternoon, but this post is about how the two versions were post-processed. They are severe crops (1:! (100%) 1 image pixel to 1 display pixel, 1199x899 pixels - so about 5% of the original frame remains.


A


B

Do you notice any difference between the two?

Unfortunately, there is some ringing around the beak, which is bit annoying. Shooting details: ISO 1000, f/3.5, 1/3200th, E-M1X @300mm

Ian

[blackfox]

first shot to me is better more fine detail in the bird . have you deployed de-noise to them yet ? just had quick play Ian and obviously only working on the j.peg I think? it improves it a bit though

[pdk42]

Little to choose between your two Ian, but Jeff’s de-noising is definitely a step in the right direction!

[BDennis]

Very nice, you are blessed! We had one local to home but I was on holiday miles away in Scotland at the time.

I really can’t tell the difference between these on my iPad screen.

This is the sort of thing I would run through DxO PureRaw. With this crop the DeepPrime option may show some sharpening artefacts so I would try the DxO HQ, Prime and DeepPrime options to see which is best. It should eliminate some of the noise on the background. You could probably get a 1 month trial if you don’t have it and wanted to try it…or get one of us to do it and send you back some DNGs to play with.

[MikeOxon]

When I zoomed in, it was clear that, in the first image, the head of the bird appeared sharper, with a catch-light in the eye. It could have been a local contrast adjustment but i don't know your processing methods. On the other hand, some of the rough grass near the bird looked sharper in the 2nd shot.

My own approach to this type of shot is to ignore overall adjustment tools and to use manual editing on the problem areas.

i used the 'polygonal lasso tool' in Photoshop to run round the edges of the bird, using my judgement where to navigate around the very 'fluffy' feathers on the throat and below the crest. I applied 3 pixels 'feather' to the selection and tidied up a few places like the tip of the beak, where the feathering had rounded the outline too much.

I then 'inverted ' the selection and applied 0.5 px Gaussian blur to the image, excluding the bird. After cancelling the selection, i worked around the edges of the bird with a small radius (10 px) 'clone stamp tool' to replace the artefacts around the edge of the beak and some other areas with areas cloned from slightly further away from the edge. Again, I used my judgement to treat the areas of very fine feathering.

Finally I used the 'Sponge' tool to desaturate the background towards the top of the image, where i felt it appeared too dominant.

This type of editing with individual 'brush' tools is very personal and doesn't take very long, once you have practised various methods on several subjects. Unlike the automatic tools, it is entirely your own decision where to apply 'corrections' and what to leave alone. I find it far more satisfying than just applying an overall tool, although i appreciate these things can be useful time savers.

My result from your image looks like this:


Mike

[Ian]

OK - this was a rather poor experiment on my part, so back to the drawing board. Basically, shot B was shot A processed in Gigapixel AI at 2x rate and then exported to JPEG at the same output size as shot A.

Thinking about it, it's unlikely that anything would be gained this way

Ian

[Ray99]

Well I'm going to buck the trend and say for me shot B is clearly better. I agree A contains more detail, but detail is not always everything. B is just more pleasant to look at for me.