Help improve this shot

Baldy

Friend and smugmugger Chris Michel, who nearly went to Yosemite but for a last minute schedule prob, shot this while on photo safari in Antarctica:



Problem is, there's noise in the sky and shadows so when printed to 24x36 it's not as clean as we'd like.

Here's the original color version:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/610902/1/25826231

Who's good at conversion to B&W and control of noise? I was going to mess with Noise Ninja but figured some of you could put some tlc into the post on this shot and make a stunning print.

Andy

i'll give it a go tonight eastern time....

rutt??????????????????????????????????????

Baldy wrote:

Friend and smugmugger Chris Michel, who nearly went to Yosemite but for a last minute schedule prob, shot this while on photo safari in Antarctica:



Problem is, there's noise in the sky and shadows so when printed to 24x36 it's not as clean as we'd like.

Here's the original color version:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/610902/1/25826231

Who's good at conversion to B&W and control of noise? I was going to mess with Noise Ninja but figured some of you could put some tlc into the post on this shot and make a stunning print.

behr655

Ok, here's my try. Using PSP9 I used the Digital Noise Removal feature then used Clarify at level 5 and again at level 3. I then bumped up the highlights and knocked down the midtones a bit. Lastly I sharpened it. I noticed while I had it on my computer that it's dimentions were 20.617" x 11.133". That could be why you are having trouble printing it large. Anyway, here is the result of my attempt. It still has a lot of noise so I'm not sure if it's good enough:




You can view the original size here: http://behr655.smugmug.com/photos/25831141-O.jpg
Bear

Steve Cavigliano

Baldy,

Here's my version. I took down the highlights a bit and NR'd the sky and water only. Lost a bit of the cloud's whispiness, but there's lots less noise there now.

http://freezeframephotography.smugmug.com/gallery/611070



Steve

rutt

This is a fun image because we can do so much to help it with so little effort. If there is a raw version, probably even more can be done.

I started off with a shadow/highlight adjustment to recover both details in both shadow and highlight.. Getting the tonal width right for the highlights is important or too much snow wil turn grey:





Washed it through NeatImage 3 allowing it to generate a custom profile and used the "Reduce Noise by Half" parameter. Clearly there is some room for playing around here.

Then I sharpened using separate Lighten and Darken layers:



Looks OK to me. Why would you want to take this to B&W? But I suppose the customer is always right. So I took this as an opportunity to share my B&W conversion technique. I grab each RGB channel and put in a separate layer with blue top and green bottom. Then I set the blending options for the blue and red layers to "Multiply" and played with the opacity sliders so I get the best contrast from each channel. It's important to stack the channel layers in this order because green always has the best resolution, followed by red, followed, followed by blue. So we just want to get some of the contrast from the blue and red layers, but green is where most of the good stuff is.

Here is my result:



And here is what the layer pallete looked like:



My full res images are available as well.

Color after sharpening: http://rutt.smugmug.com/photos/25833887-O.jpg
B&W: http://rutt.smugmug.com/photos/25833989-O.jpg

rutt

I guees I didn't make my real point clear. I don't think noise was the worst problem here at all. The problem was the lost detail. If the viewer has something to look at, the nose should be a lot less of a problem. And the bigger you print, the further back you are going to view from. But when there is no interesting foreground detail, the noise becomes the most prominent feature.

Khaos

The sky is somewhat pixelated. I noticed that when I was working on it. I also found a few dead pixels too.

My effort is almost the same as Rutt's. I may have it a little darker in the water reflections. I think no matter what when printed at 24 x 36, you'll not be happy with the sky portion of it.

pathfinder

rutt wrote:

I guees I didn't make my real point clear. I don't think noise was the worst problem here at all. The problem was the lost detail. If the viewer has something to look at, the nose should be a lot less of a problem. And the bigger you print, the further back you are going to view from. But when there is no interesting foreground detail, the noise becomes the most prominent feature.

When I downloaded the original color image I was struck by the large areas of snow along the waterline that read 255,255,255 - no detail whatsoever. Your image, John, regained a little in these areas after shadow/highllight et al, but still not much detail to begin with. I wonder if this could have been improved in the RAW Conversion.

A 1DsMkll image at ISO 100 should not have a great deal of noise at 24 x 36, should it at a reasonable 5 foot viewing distance?

Andy

chris, we need the raw file for a proper job betcha some more highlights can be saved

rutt

Well, normally I don't engage in this sort of thing, but we could cheat just a small amount with the blown snow highlights:

ginger_55

I certainly like it as recovered from doomsville.

Much better. I am not a tech person. I don't even always see OOF, so my opinion would not be as heavy as far as how much it can be enlarged, etc. But I can say that now I like it, as I see it, on my monitor.

ginger

Baldy

andy wrote:

chris, we need the raw file for a proper job betcha some more highlights can be saved

Okay, I will fetch it from Chri.

Thanks so much everyone for working on this. My one comment is the sky, though noisy, is more dramatic in Chris's original B&W. It just has more contrast. Of course, by bringing up the contrast the noise must have come up with it.

Baldy

Okay, hheeeeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeee's the RAW.

Go crazy.

Edit: vBulletin seems to want to append a .tiff at the end of the link. Just right-click on it and make sure it ends in .CR2 and nothing more.