Novice Update

[sleipnerofasgard]

Okay i tried a few experimental shots with the camera on manual and would like some advice as i am not as happy with them after putting them through photoshop and i hope it is just me doing it wrong (story of my life).





And here are the original shots





i did not put them through neat image as i tried it before and they looked much worse,i can see that the photoshop ones are sharper but they don't look right to me although all i did was use the unsharp mask,was there more i could have done?

[sleipnerofasgard]

Incidentally i only have the free version of neat image so would it be worth buying the full version?

[galanthus]

I don't think they look as if anything is wrong with them. Your robin is gorgeous and nuthatches in tree twigs such as yours are notoriously hard to get right.

Great attempts I'd say

[GerryNick2]

The Robin shot is not too bad at all especially as it looks to have been taken with a fairly high ISO.
The other shot seems to have had a problem with the lighting at the time of exposure. Will leave to the experts to bottom this one out.

Gerry

[Ollie]

The Robin looks fine to me. The exposure on the Nuthatch is a bit off.

Hope you don't mind me asking but why would you want to use manual mode. I shoot birds exclusively in AV (Aperture priority mode) as I'm sure most bird photographers do.

Don't think the paid for version of Neat image does much more than the free version apart from it being able to be installed as a plug in to Photoshop instead of a stand alone application but I could be wrong on that one.
Roger

[glsammy]

The main difference with the paid version is you can work on unlimited sized images.Not much of an advantage if your doing images for WAB. Of course, there's always the chance your not up to speed with neat image, you don't have to follow the automatic mode all the time, plus you can always isolate areas you don't want the software to deal with.
The same goes for unsharp mask. I prefer to use smart sharpen, I find it's a far gentler more controllable tool.

[glsammy]

Here's my initial effort:



One thing you hadn't done was to balance the levels. If you look at the Levels for the original Robin, you'll see a large area to the right with no data. By simply moving the pointers to match the data made the vast majority of the difference.
I ran smart sharpen, at 100%, 1.0 pixel, with Remove lens blur selected.

I then isolated the main body of the Robin, and ran neat image over the rest, at default settings.

[nutmeg]

I like your robin, sleipnerofasgard It's also good to see what Graham has done - bringing out the best in an image that was very appealing in the first place. I'm just getting started with image editing and am finding the advice given here very useful

[Hobjob]

Well I think they are great - I'd be right chuffed.