Sharpness & Noise

[WestLothian]

I have been trying to develop a better workflow for bird pictures.

1. This is shot in RAW,
2. Reviewed using the Microsoft RAW download for Image Viewer,
3. Edit selected to call the Bibble Plugin for Photoshop Elements 5.0,
4. Cropped and Level adjusted then transferred to Photoshop Elements 5.0,
5. Resized using Bicubic Sharper sampling to 1333x1000,
6. Focus area is then selected using magnetic lasso for 1px 30% unsharp mask
7. Inverse selection area for noise reduction level 6,
-. with preserve detail 25%, reduce color noise 80%
8. Finally "save as" to create a JPG
-. with all the metadata intact at an appropriate file size.

I could try applying most of this to the in-camera JPG settings and just take what comes out the camera. What are the other recommended workflows?

Thanks

[Jon]

Originally Posted by WestLothian

I have been trying to develop a better workflow for bird pictures.

1. This is shot in RAW,
2. Reviewed using the Microsoft RAW download for Image Viewer,
3. Edit selected to call the Bibble Plugin for Photoshop Elements 5.0,
4. Cropped and Level adjusted then transferred to Photoshop Elements 5.0,
5. Resized using Bicubic Sharper sampling to 1333x1000,
6. Focus area is then selected using magnetic lasso for 1px 30% unsharp mask
7. Inverse selection area for noise reduction level 6,
-. with preserve detail 25%, reduce color noise 80%
8. Finally "save as" to create a JPG
-. with all the metadata intact at an appropriate file size.

I could try applying most of this to the in-camera JPG settings and just take what comes out the camera. What are the other recommended workflows?

Thanks

Its a nice image but sounds like a lot of work to me.
Have you tried RAWSHOOTER? It was a freebie and was the software Andy Rouse used to use. I understand that it has or will shortly be incorporated into Photoshop.

In Rawshooter you can view the image, use very simple sliders to adjust contrast light, dark, sharpness etc, you then ask it to process the image and it produces a TIFF file which you then adjust in Photoshop and save as a JPEG. It is very simple to use
Jon