The trouble with digital...

[WestLothian]

I have become more disappointed with the way digital pohotography handles low light intensities and the lower shades of grey. The sensor noise levels increase and colour noise gets added. At best there is a digital on/off interpretation between black and a dirty low level grey. It is also difficult to clean-up and smoothe the speckle in the editors.

An example is the "bird on the wire" shot below which is spoilt by an ugly black cable that is highly speckled even in the RAW format due to the low number of digital levels that can be recorded.


100% crop from Microsoft RAW to jpg conversion.

P.S. note the stuck pixel near the tail.
(Nikon have offered to "sort" it under warranty)

[WestLothian]

I tried a Photoshop repair but I'm still not happy with it.
I chose a branch with the same diameter and length,
rotated it and added it as a layer below the original
deleted the wire to reveal the branch and then "healed"
and "cloned" the gaps.



Any thoughts and advice for recovering would be most welcome.

[glsammy]

Do you use Neat Image or similar?

I ran your image through and this is the result:




Obviously I was only working on your uploaded version, you'd get better results working on the original.

[WestLothian]

Thanks - I am downloading it now to try.
I have also tried the Ninja, the Bibble, the CaptureOne, ....
but the Neat looks, well quite "neat" (S0RRY)

[WestLothian]

First attempt - smoother certainly at the expense of some sharpness.
I need to study more of the options (and there are a few).

Thanks for the tip !

[DaiTheDragon]

With most of my images that need some noise reduction I will mask the bird and apply Noise Ninja to the background only and then apply sharpening and or reduce noise to only the bird. Don't forget the tighter the crop the more obvious the noise is.

Dai

[Kev Lewis]

WestLothian: if you'd like to send me a copy of the uncropped original raw file I'd be happy to see what can be done with it. kevin@thelewiss.co.uk will find me

[WestLothian]

Thanks Kev,

I will send a NEF file when I stop work.
What software and tricks do you use ?

[Kev Lewis]

Originally Posted by WestLothian

Thanks Kev,

I will send a NEF file when I stop work.
What software and tricks do you use ?

Nothing out of the ordinary WestLothian. My main RAW convertor is Capture One Pro followed by CS2 processing with a few tweaks, if they work I'll let you know what I've done so you can add them to the personal armoury The main trick is good exposure, get that right and very little processing should be required. I'll pm the result back with info and you can then decide what to do with it

regards Kev

[MalcolmX]

generally the higher the iso the higher the noise so if you can make more use of the tripod and a lower iso this will help .cs3 and light box have better raw converters as they have incorporated and improved on the capture one they took over
noise is generally resident in the red and blue channels can you apply your noise filter by channels?