6 Spot Burnet Moth?

Looks good a little noisey but is it a large crop?

Detail is very good stick a 36mm tube on that lens then you can do macro. This is close-up for sure :)

I would clone out that grass blade that is pointing to the moth.
 
If you have Lightroom have a read up of masking - it will allow you to sharpen the subject but not the background which is useful in such situations.
 
It is a lovely image, but I'm afraid you have lost a lot of detail in dealing with the noise.

Did you shoot raw or JPEG? Either way, if you would like to put the original JPEG up at Flickr, or even better the raw somewhere like Dropbox if you shot raw, then I know at least one person who would love to play with it. :)
 
It is a lovely image, but I'm afraid you have lost a lot of detail in dealing with the noise.

Did you shoot raw or JPEG? Either way, if you would like to put the original JPEG up at Flickr, or even better the raw somewhere like Dropbox if you shot raw, then I know at least one person who would love to play with it. :)

:agree: let Nick play
 
It is a lovely image, but I'm afraid you have lost a lot of detail in dealing with the noise.

Did you shoot raw or JPEG? Either way, if you would like to put the original JPEG up at Flickr, or even better the raw somewhere like Dropbox if you shot raw, then I know at least one person who would love to play with it. :)

:agree: I second that let Nick play :)
 
:agree: let Nick play
:agree: I second that let Nick play :)

He he. Not just me I hope. We all have different takes on these things. For example, I'm not sure I'd try to take out that blade of grass. Derek has taken it out successfully, but given the way it aligns parallel with the long axis through the moth, reinforcing its orientation, I'd be inclined to leave it, perhaps de-emphasising it just a little if I could get away with it.

I think it's always interesting to see several people's interpretations/modifications. Teaches me a thing or two, that's for sure. I've had that with Bryn for example, where he has opened my eyes to something I simply wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

BTW, did you notice the decentring of the crop in the Derek's second version? I like that.
 
A little bit later than I thought (rubbish bank holiday so I went to the pub) I have uploaded the original RAW to dropbox.
It can be downloaded from the following link.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wvmz2yynejgpcjp/IMG_8850.CR2?dl=0

This is a 23Mb file. If you download it you will see the amount of cropping involved to get the final image. It does say a lot for the Sigma 150-600 S lens.

Could you also please say what processing you did as I am sure more than me can learn from experienced photshoppers.

Derek.
 
Thanks for uploading the raw file Derek. I can see the problem now. Like you said, it really is a big crop. In fact, it is a 100% crop.


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 1 crop
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

On top of this, the capture was exposed, very nicely, for the whole image, but this leaves the moth very dark, so it needs hefty shadow lifting to get to see the detail of the fur. And it is ISO 400, which at 100% has significant noise, on top of which is added the noise of the shadow lifting.

It is IMO a very difficult image (crop) to handle.

Applying Lightroom noise reduction, even with masking, killed the detail. I tried two, rather more extreme approaches.

The first approach involved selective operations in Lightroom. I first applied noise reduction globally on the image (which killed the detail). I then painted this area with the Adjustment Brush and applied 100% negative noise - this removes the noise reduction in the painted area.


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 2 negative NR painted area
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

I made various adjustments as shown below, including raising the Exposure and Shadows, and applying global sharpening.


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 4 Selective Lightroom, global Lightroom adjustments IMG_8850 LR
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

I then wanted to get a bit more texture showing in the fur and wings, so I painted that area and applied additional sharpening to it.


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 3 extra sharpness painted area
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

This was the end result.

NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 5 Selective Lightroom operations IMG_8850 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

The other approach I tried was to tackle the noise first by applying DXO Prime raw noise reduction to the raw file. This produced a noise-reduced DNG file that I then processed in Lightroom.

In this case I only made global adjustments in Lightroom. (Which means this is not a fair like for like comparison as to which is best as between the two techniques. The DXO version is at a disadvantage as it only uses global adjustments. Obviously the two techniques could be combined.)


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet - 6 DXO Prime, global Lightroom adjustments IMG_8850 LR
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

This included a bit more sharpening than with the previous technique. That was possible because the whole image, including the moth, had had noise reduction, so it could take more sharpening without turning nasty. This version had no luminance noise reduction, but I forgot to turn off the Colour noise reduction. I don't think this would have made much difference.

This was the resulting image.


NOT MY IMAGE - DerekL Burnet -7 DXO Prime NR then Lightroom global IMG_8850_DxO LR
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

Not a great result in either case I'm afraid, but hopefully this was interesting in terms of potential techniques to consider. And perhaps someone else can produce a better result. There may well be more effective techniques than I have used. And also, tastes differ quite markedly as to what people like to see. I go in for rather low key colours and contrast for example, and I think most people prefer their images to have greater visual impact.
 
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