Post your Mammals
- Thread starter Scott Murray
- Start date
Andy W
Senior Member
That looks great for 4000 ISO. Did you use something other than photoshop to remove noise?
Thanks, Andy. And yes...I used Nik Dfine2. First I do my basic RAW edits in Camera RAW which has the same tools as Lightroom but set up in a different layout (my PC doesn't like to run both Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time).
After my basic edits in CR, I went to Photoshop where I invoked Nik Dfine2. It will automatically read the noise and apply its own assessment of noise reduction. In this photo, the dotted rectangular boxes are where it reads the noise. I probably went in and moved the largest dot over the bunny and had it reread the noise (but didn't do it in this example). Once it's done the overall noise reduction, I click where I circled in red to bring up sliders that I can manually override the overall effect. The nice thing with The Nik Collection is it also has an adjustment brush where I could have gone in and painted an area - and from there, I would have had the option to manually lower the effect in just that one spot. However, for this image, I didn't do that. Just letting you know in case you aren't familiar with the program.
So after I clicked on the Reduce tab circled above, it opens sliders for Contrast Noise and Color Noise. Those allow me to lower the overall effect of the auto noise reduction that was applied. I almost always lower both sliders but tend to keep a slightly higher value with the Color Noise slider than I do with the Contrast Noise slider. Offhand, I don't recall what values I used. Generally I try 65 as a starting point for Contrast Noise and maybe 70 or 75 for Color Noise. Then I tweak those two sliders until I see something I can live with. Then I head back to Photoshop.
After all my others edits in Photoshop are finished (such as Nik Color Efex Pro, layer masks, etc), I tend to convert my image to a Smart Object.
With my wildlife images, quite often I use a noise adjustment brush on the background in Camera RAW as a final step. With the original edited image, I used 80 for the background noise reduction. The area circled shows CR allows a colored mask to appear which shows where you are painting. It also allows you to choose the color of the mask which I have set to that awful bright green color (it's a color different enough from what tends to be in any of my images so it stands out easily).
Once the Noise Reduction is applied, I head back to Photoshop. Having any remaining edits done with the image as a Smart Object allows me to go back to Camera RAW as many times as I want and tweak those last edits. Some people will convert to a Smart Object at the beginning of their workflow. This is just how I've been doing it. But if I determine I used too much or too little noise reduction in CR, I can go back and simply adjust the original slider if needed. And this last step of CR is where I tend to add my vignette.
As I said, quite often I will tweak background noise in my wildlife images so it isn't quite as obvious - unless it doesn't appear to be that noticeable. The Nik Collection used to be free before it was picked up by DXO Mark (I think that's who owns it now). So I use the free Google Nik Collection rather than the newer paid version. If you have any questions with this overall explanation of how I did the noise reduction, please let me know.
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I think I would gladly let this guy eat from my bird feeder if it meant seeing him around the neighborhood.
Thanks for treating him well. These guys are a very valuable part of the ecosystem.
I think I would gladly let this guy eat from my bird feeder if it meant seeing him around the neighborhood.
We have one that lives under the storage shed in the back yard. It startled Chris one night when it climbed on the feeder and fell off.
