TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I agree. No real need for f13 or a shutter speed that high. Opening up the aperture and lowering the SS will allow lower ISO resulting in less noise and a sharper image due to less diffraction.

JeffDavidson Loc: Originally Detroit Now Los Angeles

If extreme cropping is an issue, before you crop, remove noise, adjust color and exposure if necessary, the use something like Topaz's Gigapixel AI to enable you to crop/enlarge it significantly with no pixelization.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

Stop using ISO 500 for something setting still in bright light.

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

I was taught to think of what happens to pictures that are cropped, and thus enlarged to bring in the view, as though one put a nice dark mark on a balloon before inflating it.

The mark is sharp and dark on the deflated balloon. This equates to the pixels being densely packed together. Now when the balloon is inflated the line becomes blurred and faint as it expands. The size of the "pixels" increases as does the space between them which attributes to the line being less sharp.

Same number of pixels yet now larger and more space between them.

Even the best software has limitations as it performs calculations and attempts to fill in the gaps. Edges get soft, colors tend to get muddy where they join other colors, and when zoomed in tight the picture may even appear to be much like that of an 'Impressionist Painting'.

The important factor is..."What will be the viewing distance of the finished product?" The pixel density and size of pixels is far different when printed as a 5X7 which is intended to be viewed at an arm's length compared to a Billboard intended to be viewed from 100-feet away or further where the pixels are large and the dpi is low.

What happens in the digital world today is that we all tend to zoom in to the pixel level. It's like looking at a beautiful woman's face with a powerful magnifying glass looking at the pores in the skin....not quite the same beauty now.

We are also limited to the ability of whatever monitor we view the picture on as well as what happens to the resolution when posting the picture electronically. All in all, the subject is quite dynamic.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Nonsense. DPI is a printer metric. You can test this by setting your dpi to 1 and then 1200 - and you'll see no change in the image, unless you are resizing.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Nothing wrong with ISO 500. My cardinal image was shot at ISO 800. That is not the problem with Lynda's image - underexposure, high amount of color noise and less than optimal post processing is the issue.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

I'm not familiar with the D7500 so I don't know how noise-prone it is or how much the noise is due to cropping v ISO, and I also don't know how much you lightened the bird in PP. However, Gene51 has a point, and when he says "underexposed", he's referring specifically to the bird, not the sky. If the bird came out much darker than we're seeing in your shot, it's because the camera metered for the large amounts of sky which would result in the bird being underexposed. Nothing brings out noise quite like large amounts of lifting the shadows.

PS - I see you used spot metering. If you missed the bird with the spot, the camera would have metered for the sky.

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

The sandy texture is characteristic of digital noise, not pixelation. A lower ISO would have been better, and as CHG_CANON has said, would be possible with wider aperture and/or slower shutter speed.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

If I were trying to get an image of this Kingfisher, I might have a shutter speed of 1/1500 or so in anticipation of flight - but I would first try to get a couple of sitting shots at say 1/500 and then switch to 1500 waiting for flight. With small hard to approach birds like this Kingfisher - where you KNOW you will be cropping heavily, low ISO ( and, necessarily fast lenses ! ) becomes a very high priority ! especially on a crop frame camera.
.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

Oops, forgot to include PROPER EXPOSURE in my list of parameters above for optimization for pixel enlargement.
.

anotherview Loc: California

I like your subject decently captured. The image might improve by using a lower f-stop setting, like f/5.6, and then lowering the ISO accordingly to reduce noise. You might even lower the shutter speed by a click or two to correspond to the other settings. You might have to go manual to achieve the best outcome.

Did you use the lens correction module to adjust for lens irregularities? This module can remove chromatic aberration instantly.

I suggest you experiment with these settings and adjustments to examine results.

jerryd49 Loc: Indianapolis, IN

That's a terrific image. Nicely done.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

That's not pixelated - it's sensor noise because of the ISO500 used for your shot. For an image like this, with plenty of natural light, you should set the f/stop wide open, ISO as low as it goes in Aperture Priority mode, and then take the pic. Newer camera bodies and lenses can use higher ISO settings and keep sensor noise down much better. Older technology, not so much!

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I would be interested to see the original image file, before you started cropping it.

ISO 500 should not have produced much noise.

1/1250 is plenty fast for a handheld shot of a perched bird.

Why in the world were you stopped down to f/13? That's getting into "diffraction" territory, where too small aperture starts to soften images and rob fine detail.

Much better would have been to use f/8.... or even your lens wide open at f/6.3. I haven't used that lens, so don't know if it's at its best wide open... some lenses need to be stopped down a little for best sharpness.

A larger aperture also would have allowed a lower ISO, which would have helped.

There are other problems with this image. It's under-exposed. That's probably due to all the blue sky, which tends to cause most cameras to want to under-expose.

Also, there appears to be a blue color cast over the whole image. There's also some chromatic aberration on the bird and the branch.

Do you have a filter on the lens? If so, I'd try without it. A filter might cause color tints and accentuate chromatic aberrations. There also is a bit of a halo around the subject, which may be due to sharpening.

Normally I don't do sharpening in Lightroom.... When doing the RAW conversion, I just leave LR sharpening at the default setting, which is very slight. I leave the sharpening until later in Photoshop, where it can be done much more selectively. For example, as you'll see below, I didn't apply any sharpening to the blue sky, because that might have made it look "grainy". In fact, sharpening is one of the last steps I do to an image, in Photoshop and only as one of the very last image editing steps.... ALWAYS long after any noise reduction has been done and usually only after the image has been sized and/or cropped to final requirements.

I couldn't do that here, because the image has already been cropped and sharpened. Still, I wanted to see if it was recoverable to some extent.

Hope you don't mind, but I took your image into Photoshop and applied some noise reduction trying to see if the image would clean up at all. Unfortunately, it needed A LOT of NR to have any effect. Even then, I still needed to go in and do some selective "blurring" of some of the worst pixelated areas.

Then I applied both unsharp mask and high pass sharpening technique, to try to recover the image after all the loss of sharpness to the NR efforts.

That brought back some of the pixelization... so I did a bit more blurring on a very small scale.

All the above was done very selectively, so as not to to effect the sky behind the bird and branch. I also tried to deal with some of the chromatic aberration, the worst of the halo and reducing the color cast with a warming filter, along with increasing exposure, contrast, vibrance and color saturation a wee bit.

I think this would print pretty well as an 8x8 or 12x12 max (i.e., about the size displayed when download is viewed here on UHH, but not at the max magnification... assuming it's being viewed on a typical monitor set to it's native resolution).

See what you think:

(Download)

anotherview Loc: California

The lens and camera settings you suggest would likely produce a cleaner starting image. You have well described your process for editing a given image in Photoshop. You have a writing talent, too, for clear expression. The OP can benefit from your teaching.