Hi all! First post here, so I hope I’m getting this right
I caught this Red Kite checking me out, recently. It was daylight but very overcast and I had a fast shutter, so it’s quite noisy. I’m trying to bring out some detail and colour, but my results are a little flat. Can anyone suggest alternatives?
NB: Using DT 5.0.1(I can de-noise via DxO, but I’m also trying to get better at pure DT processing). RAW and XMP attached.
Hey @Terry_Dooher welcome to the forum. Traditional we assign a license to the images so that our other members know that they’re free to edit and share edits of the images. The most typical license is the Creative Commons. You just need to add some text that says something like “this image is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 (or whichever flavor of CC you want)”.
Welcome to the forum! As @paperdigits mentioned, this is pretty much how we do it here, you assign a CC license, so that people are allowed to edit your photo, like this:
Welcome to the forum and DT. I am more than satisfied with the noise reduction capabilities of DT and I shoot a lot of noisy images. Currently I am editing some 3200 ISO shots of Hiroshima at night shot with my Canon G16 compact camera.
This image was processed in DT 5.1 but the xmp file should load fine in DT5.0. Instead of using filmic or sigmoid tone mappers for this image I used base curve fusion option. This old school module sometimes works great for backlit images like this bird image. The retouch module made light work of the powerlines. I applied two instances of denoise (profiled) at default values to subdue the noise. I also adjusted threshold slider in the old school sharpen module to minimise the sharpening of noise in the bird. I usually use the diffuse or sharpen module for basic sharpening but the threshold slider available in the sharpen module can help with noisy images in my view. DSC_9531.NEF.xmp (16.7 KB)
Thank you this was fun to edit. I feel like I cheated a lot with the colors
Decided to leave the image soft (I prefer softer looking pictures in general) and lots of grain
Maybe not the best selection on the bird but inspired by Tim’s edit I added a blue sky using RGB curves and a parametric mask. DSC_9531.NEF.xmp (29.4 KB)
@priort so you used the watermark module to effectively composite an extra layer into the image. That is an interesting strategy and shows that DT would be capable of exploiting layers and composites if the developers shared the vision that there is value in doing that.
Thanks for the welcome, everyone! I love the responses, especially the more naturalistic ones (@Tim@Popanz@Terry) Double-applying the denoise module is a new trick to me, I’ll have to try that out on some of my other shots.
I’m still very much a novice, and am trying to train myself out of the ‘all noise is bad’ mindset. I also tend to aim for verisimilitude, so I felt I’d be cheating by removing the power line. Our local countryside is criss-crossed with them.
@priort - I’d never have considered the watermark module for such a lift-and-shift of a background like that. Inspired
Ha…welcome to the forum…it does actually work not half bad for a simple sky or background replacement if you can get a good mask…given you were thinking about keeping the power lines though I dare say I violated the spirit of your vision of keeping it natural… I don’t do it all that often but rather than fight with an image if there is a decent chance to keep it by just doing a little of this now and again then I might find myself thinking about it… you can also use the compose module to do some things with blending two images…
I could have also used the compose module I suppose but I have a couple of presets as starting points in the watermark module… I have used it to both replace a sky or with low opacity in certain skies to just add some diffuse cloud, texture and or color to the existing sky if it is lackluster or if it might work…of course sometimes the image is also just fine with the sky blown out or as is but this was just playing around so I thought lets give that graceful creature a nice colorful sky
