Saturday 15 May 2010

Noiseware Professional

I photographed this Black-backed Dwarf Kingfisher at Kithulgala in February, 2010. I was guiding a serious bird photography tour with Felix Ng from Hong Hong and two of his friends. Felix wielded the latest Canon EOS 1D Mark iv fitted with a Canon EF 500mm F4 super telephoto Lens. After he was done, I borrowed his monster lens and coupled it with my Canon 40D to shoot this beauty. The settings I used were 1/25 and ISO800. As this bird was in a dimly lit spot, the high ISO enabled me to lighten things up to catch more detail. As expected the high ISO also resulted in rendering the image a bit grainy in the final output, which you can see especially in the background.


In order to get rid of the grainy effect resulted from camera noise, I used a camera noise removal software named Noiseware Professional for post processing. See the result below.


Noiseware Professional is a plug in filter that can be used with Photoshop and it is very easy to use. The whole operation of cleaning up the image just took me less than 30 seconds.

Edit: This is in response to flowergirl's comment in this post. The grainy effect is more obvious when you see the image zoomed in/cropped. Here's a close crop to reveal it:


And the same after filtering it through NP.

14 comments:

Offthebeatentrack said...

Wow...I'm still drooling over that lens! :)

Lady divine said...

You show me that nature has a way of surprising us each day with beautiful creations..

Look at the colours and beautiful details...

WOW!

Like I said before,you never fail to amaze me.:)

Dee said...

wow what an amazing looking bird. Also, where's that leech post?

Amila Salgado said...

Hi Naren,
Not surprised!
It is a darn good lens for people like us.

Hi Lady Divine,
Very nice to hear that, thanks!
It is an uncommon resident here, and I always take a lot of pride in finding it.

Hi Dee,
Thanks! I am afraid that post was removed as a few of my readers wrote to me to say that they were disgusted by it. I thought I should not put them off, and got rid of it.

Me-shak said...

Wow, Amila :D
You have done a great job, it doesn't look like the bird was in a dim spot at all. Good job, as usual :)
Looking forward for more.
Cheers!

Kirigalpoththa said...

It surely has some great effect. The second picture is very crispy!

flowergirl said...

Err. Lovely bird, but sorry, I can see no difference between the two pics.
(Scratching my head), where should I look?

And that's a shame...I loved that leech!

Amila Salgado said...

Hi Shak,
It was dim but not too bad for photography as the bird was quite near too.

Hi K,
Hope you will like the edited ones too.

Hi flowergirl,
I appreciate your question. I have edited the post to include two close cropped shots. Have a look now to see what I mean.
Sorry about that other post.

Kirigalpoththa said...

Yep, the edited one tells the story clearly. No grainy effect after filtering through NP. Perfect!

Amila Kanchana said...

Unbelievable!

Phil Slade said...

Please don't apologise in any way for those superb pictures. Just a brilliant set of images.

Amila Salgado said...

Hi K an Amila,
Thanks guys!

Hi Phil,
No problem! Good to hear from you.

Stuart Price said...

You did nice PPing here, I don't have the patience. I tried Noise Ninja and it always seemed to make the picture worse so I gave up.

A bad workman always blames his tools, I know I know.

Amila Salgado said...

Hi Stu,
Apologies for the delay in replying. I've heard about Noise Ninja from two Brits that I guided last season. They seemed happy with it. I haven't tried it, so cannot tell you more about it. NP on the other hand is very very easy to use and you don't have to be a geek to get the work done.

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