Here’s a beautiful woodpecker showing off what it caught this month. I do like getting ethereal style to my work.
They are hard enough to find/see in the wild, to find one and get a great picture is insane :)
They’re quite common where I’m at.
great iq in this shot. what do you use?
For this one, according to history starting from after default orientation:
- Tone Curve (XYZ)
- Crop
- Profiled Denoise
- Color Contrast
- Local Contrast
The camera itself is Canon EOS R7. 200-800 mm Canon Lens. It’s a bit of a noise monster though.
I use an R7 too and have been shooting a lot of night sports. 8-12k ISO to get a fast enough shutter and yeah, unsurprisingly noisy af.
Not sure what you’re processing with but Dxo Photolab cleans them up amazingly well, I found it noticeably better than LR. You need to shoot in Raw for the good NR stuff, but for me personally I do that anyway for the flexibility to adjust some of the settings I inevitably got wrong in the moment. I have zero affiliation with them beyond being happy with the product.
I’m processing using RAW, and Darktable. I try to keep my ISO low as 1250, but will go up when necessary. I use manual.
Not a critique of the pic you’ve posted (which is gorgeous btw), just mentioning as you’ve called out the noisiness that comes with high-res crop sensors, and sharing what worked for me.
I really like Darktable, but if you have a Mac or Windows machine (or check if they’ll work with Wine, I didn’t try as I needed to get a mainstream OS for unrelated reasons), it’s definitely worth giving the paid options a go, use the free trials. The first time I tried on a pic taken at night on a fast shutter at 5-digit ISO I was astonished.
This one’s only at 2500 ISO, but here’s a sample 1:1 crop with just optical corrections:
In Darktable, with the default workflow followed by profiled denoise (which incidentally creates a 67MB intermediate DNG, the CR3 is 45MB):
And denoised in Photolab on default settings:
The result certainly looks better. I’ll use something else for the denoising. I actually do use Winblows here though.
Ha! I am vindicated with the lower pixel count and thus fatter pixels on my R10.
…That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
(And it was totally not because I was too skint to afford an R7, or an R6 Mk2, or pinch-me-I’m-dreaming, an R5. No siree.)
