My Mr Lincoln

[ucci]

Okay so this is not the real Mr Lincoln, the big cheese President, but just his namesake rose from Mrs ucci's garden. Sorry for the perfidious trickery. But thanks for viewing and any comments posted which might help me do better.

[Donald]

Ken - I see from the EXIF data that you were at ISO800. I'm never very good at the technical stuff, but it seems a bit noisy to me. Were you in very low light?

I do like the highlights you've picked up on the petals. My initial reaction is that you could give it the Sharon (Daisy Mae) treatment.

[Bobobird]

Mrs ucci is a wonderful gardener coming up with really great looking flowers.

A shot to be proud of.

[annie5154]

Lovely shot Ken, the rose looks quite velvety. Well done.

[ucci]

Thank you Donald, Bobo and Anne for your comments. Much appreciated.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Ken,

~ and any comments posted which might help me do better.

It is quite noisy when viewed in the Lytebox.

The first thing I do with a flower shot, especially a red one, is check out the red channel's histogram to see if it was blown.
This isn't, in fact it shows signs of stretched contrast, so I think it was underexposed a bit.

My tactics shooting something such as this would be;
a) shoot RAW
b) check the camera's RGB histogram to ensure correct exposure, reshoot until a good one is obtained
c) if I'm having to shoot at an iso like 800 due to lack of light;

i) consider adding light by bouncing a flash into a larger reflector, or
ii) shoot as you did, but then....

d) Don't capture sharpen (this was also why I wouldn't shoot jpg, because that will do it and sharpen the noise in the process)
e) Process for best result, this would include Local Contrast Enhancement, save as a psd (or tif)
f) Downsize using bicubic or bicubic smoother
g) Only then would I sharpen the image, with as low a threshold as the (now reduced by downsizing) noise will allow and an amount in the order of 80% and radius of 0.3 or 0.4 pixels

Cheers,

[ucci]

Hi Dave
Thank you for the great advice and help. It is very useful and very much appreciated. I tend to use higher sharpening than this of the order of 100 to 150 % and 1.5 to 2 pixels. Before I do This I often apply the Noise Median filter with a setting of 1 to 2 to try and 'smooth' out the background noise. Is this a retrograde step?
Cheers
Ken

[ggt]

beautiful!

[dje]

Hi Ken, nice rose, nice capture.

As for the noise, I have found it more effective to remove noise in ACR ie at the raw processing stage. I find the Noise Median filter in PS a bit "severe" as it blurs the edges quite a bit as well as blurring the noise.

I had a play with your jpeg in ACR with the following settings in the "Detail" tab.

Sharpening
Amount 50, Radius 1, Detail 10, Masking 40
Noise Reduction
Luminance Noise 50, luminance detail 50, Colour 50, Colour detail 50

I think this demonstrates that the shot can be "rescued from the noise". Doing this on the raw image would be more effective of course.


Dave

[Mark von Kanel]

Thanks for tricking me! lovely shot well done, like the edit dave has done, got learn how to do this stuff!

[AB26]

Hi Ken,
I am envious when I see somebody getting a red rose to look like a rose. Got to agree with Mark - need to learn how to do it.

[kdoc856]

I admire very much the lighting and exposure control Ken did to preserve the stunning reds, and also the noise reduction accomplished by Dave that did such a great job of preserving sharpness while removing what was a meddlesome noise level. Well done, both of you.

[LeoLeo]

Hi Ken,

I hope you don't mind for my edit (if yes, I will delete it).

You are right to choose square crop, but I don't think red and green are working in this picture proportion, I just try to isolate a bit ...



Hope it helps,
Leo
PS: again my edit looks different between local and what is shown in forum, from colours point of view....

[ucci]

Hi Ken,

I hope you don't mind for my edit (if yes, I will delete it).

You are right to choose square crop, but I don't think red and green are working in this picture proportion, I just try to isolate a bit ...



Hope it helps,
Leo
PS: again my edit looks different between local and what is shown in forum, from colours point of view....

Hi Leo
Any helpful input and advice is much appreciated. That is why we post. To learn and expand our horizons. Thank you
Ken

[ucci]

Thanks to all who posted comments and helpful advice. Now, I am off to work on mastering ACR! But as Big Arnie once said, "I'll be back!"
Ken

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Dave
Thank you for the great advice and help. It is very useful and very much appreciated. I tend to use higher sharpening than this of the order of 100 to 150 % and 1.5 to 2 pixels. Before I do This I often apply the Noise Median filter with a setting of 1 to 2 to try and 'smooth' out the background noise. Is this a retrograde step?

Hi Ken,

Probably - I can't say I have tried it though.
It is good you do the filter first, but as (the other) Dave has said, that can be brutal wih detail.

I guess you use those radius settings on the full size image?
Something to consider;
if you do 1.5 px radius on the full size image,
then downsize it (to fit our screens better and not be too many kB file size) from say 2,500px to 1,100px, that's a ratio of a bit less than half, so your 1.5px radius is now about 0.6-0.7 as we see it
... so if you didn't sharpen until after the downsize;
the downsize gets rid of a lot of the noise for you
then the sharpen, which should now done at that smaller radius (so it isn't putting visible halos around edges), does far less damage
(but I still recommend that 0.3px at 100%-ish is all you'll need)

By the by (not related to my advice), my rescue attempt, using Neat Image and a bit of LCE



Cheers,