nikonbrain Loc: Crystal River Florida

I don't know what your printer can and can't do but my printer can . It is a 44" wide format printer and can take 100 foot rolls and the printer alone has a 1 terabyte hard drive .And can use every bit of 45 megapixels. The rest I will agree with we have already printed 300 megapixels images of a gigapan .

rossk Loc: Melbourne, Australia

I find the 850 to be a superb camera in every respect. I have recently purchased second-hand a Sigma 150-500mm f5-6-6.3 APO HSM lens with OS. Using it handheld at both relatively low (400) and high (2500) ISO ratings give me great images. Noise levels are minmal and image quality terrific.

tomcat

The mallard is spectacular, but the warbler does show a lot of something grainy in the background. I had a D800 3-4 years ago and would get similar results like you did with the warbler. It would drive me nuts to see what I thought was noise in the background whenever the background was lighter than the subject. Sometimes I thought I was capturing pixels of "darkness". The subjects never had noise, ever, but the backgrounds would and I just did not know what this is. Any ideas from our Hoggers?

GalaxyCat Loc: Boston, MA

I stand corrected, and this was a lively discussion, which was all that I meant to start, and I am very upset that I was called a troll.
So have a nice day, everyone.

Apaflo Loc: Anchorage, Alaska

A very good observation on your part! There is indeed obvious noise in the background, it is not obvious in the subject, nor is it obvious what causes it but it indeed appears to be pixels of darkness.

Actually the noise is also in the subject, but it is harder to see in darker or busy areas than in smoother, lighter less busy areas, plus the post processing of the subject area is different than the lighter background.and is making it worse.

The noise is called "photon noise" and is because photons travel at different speeds with groups arriving, but with a "clump" of darkness between the groups. It is much easier to see in the sky than in a shadow. And various kinds of smart sharpening can make it stand out.

That image needs to have the lighter smooth background areas blurred rather than sharpened. You can see halos from excessive sharpening around the edges of any darker area against the background.

Basically too much automatic "short cut" processing where a more sophisticated touch would produce better results.

tomcat

Thanks Apaflo for pointing this out. I thought that there is a huge difference in the background noise between the warbler and Steve Perry's bird backgrounds. His are much more creamier or blurred with zero noise. Are you basically saying that the warbler was over sharpened and that this action produced the noise?

Apaflo Loc: Anchorage, Alaska

The wrong kind of processing was used on the warbler image. It emphasized the photon noise rather than removing it.

Smoothing rather than sharpening is needed on the background. Only the detail of the bird itself needs any sharpen applied.

A quick reality check can verify this, though it will not come even close to providing a production image. Just mask off, or use a simple selection for the background, to separate it from the subject. The selection can be feathered to make the transition less obnoxious. Adjust the feathering depending on the pixel dimensions of the image being worked on. Then apply a Gaussian blur to the entire background. Experiment with how much feathering and how much blur.

Then reprocess from the beginning and back up one step for anything that brings out noise in the background.

Incidentally this demonstrates a case where "capture sharpening" is very detrimental.

tomcat

Thanks for your PP workflow! Regarding capture sharpening, I was told several years ago to never apply any sharpening from the camera but to save it as the final step just prior to printing.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Please let me know when this happens, I will travel across the country (seriously) so we can have cocktails overlooking the park. Just not in the winter, I'm a Californian and consequently a weather wimp. You Go Girl.

jkatpc Loc: Virginia Beach

Thanks for the information. I haven't ventured into the more advanced areas of Photoshop yet (only editing in Lightroom). Appreciate your observations.

tomcat

yeah, if you will notice, many of the images of birds that we see from the famous wildlife photographers are highly processed. Particularly those that are tack sharp because you don't see that level of sharpness or the HDC effects in real life with your eyes. The blurred backgrounds are also contrived, although not badly misrepresented because when we look at something with our eyes, we "see" the oof areas also. But our eyes can change dof in a nanosecond so when you try to see a blurred background, you really can't because the focus point changes that rapidly. Our eyes are one of God's miracle creations. I wish my cameras could focus that fast.

However, the PP of birds is not a bad thing at all and I'm not complaining or criticizing the photographer at all. I thoroughly enjoy seeing the beauty of the image in all it's glorious details.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

All very nice, but did it capture yhe smell?

LoneRangeFinder Loc: Left field

Hopefully there was a breeze. You don’t know smells until you’ve been in the Oregon Sea Lion Caves with a hundred or more Sea Lions. Yikes.