* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #854 / Revived #074 on 2024 08 28 *

I was positive you would have some...

After a lot of toing and froing I bought ACDSee Ultimate - which is on a healthy special at the moment until tomorrow (4/9/24)

Here is my first attempt with a lift in exposure, some other minor changes and lifting of shadows with a (so far) wonderful mask tool that automatically finds and masks the subject.

I was aghast at first with some terrible mottled noise in the sky. Quite some digging revealed that it was caused by preset colour noise reduction - oddly one of very few presets in ACDSee... I had noticed the same thing in RawTherapee and I guess it would have had the same cause.

C&C welcomed on the result

[Edit] Quite frankly I am not impressed with the sharpening - even Faststone does better. Maybe something to learn there...

Between Dan, Bryan, and myself we could probably do a special week of posts on Cradle Mountain. As we have opened this subject up, what I found most interesting in Dan's shot is that he avoided something that most images here do. Photo after photo, including mine, use portrait for Cradle mountain and use the V between the peaks to begin a sight line that takes in one of the features Bryan mentions. Dan did it differently and filled in the V with clouds and added lighting to the cloud edges to take the eye there. I didn't like Dan's colours but it was a different way to deal with the twin peaks.

I don't know anything about AC/DC. Lightroom would handle the shadows here quite well.
Meanwhile, I'd try some experiments in exposing to the right. Even if the sooc still looked dark in the shadows, it would make raising the shadow areas easier without much of a noise penalty.
Nicely framed shot that makes the most of the diagonals. I saw a lot of wedgies driving down the Stuart Highway over the weekend. They were feasting on roadkill.

The ETTR technique involves setting base iso, the widest aperture that gives the required dof and then slow the shutter speed until the camera's histogram touches the right side.

Normally you can't do that for BIF because at base iso you won't be able to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze flapping wings and push the histogram to the right hand side edge.

In any case, ETTR is most beneficial in low light situations where there is much more initial headroom for the histogram to be pushed to the right. In good light the headroom is much less and so the benefits of ETTR are then minimal.

To put the maximum amount of light onto the sensor within dof and blur requirements without clipping highlights for BIF the best way I know is to set the widest aperture for my dof and the slowest shutter speed that will freeze motion in the scene. I then let iso land wherever it likes as long as highlights are not clipped.

The camera mode that works best for me for BIF is aperture priority with auto iso and a minimum shutter speed set.

I set the widest aperture that gives my dof and I set the minimum shutter speed to the slowest that will freeze motion - eg. flapping wings.

This maximises the quality of the raw data within the above requirements by maximising the SNR and so minimising visible noise.

It then becomes very easy for any reputable noise removal app to remove the visible noise.

Working with nominally 16 bit raw files instead of 8 bit jpegs also gives much more flexibility in post processing, eg raising shadows, dialling back highlights etc.

I wasn't happy so went back to the start. It turns out that using the automask in ACDSee, and tweaking exposure and or a few other things too (not so) far introduces some artifacts around the edges.
ACDSee does have another tool called LightEQ. It has Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. Adjusting these globally produced a result I was happy with. It seems this is the only place were shadows can be adjusted. In the General pane or masking pane, the option is Fill Light which seems to affect bright and dark areas together. I will ask questions about these things in the online help when I get "approved".
So I used ACDSee to adjust shadows and highlights, exported as a Tiff, went into RawTherapee and adjusted exposure and sharpening there. I am not happy that the sharpening in ACDSee seems lacklustre, but as I said above I may be missing something.
Sorry if this all seems a bit of a ramble and not appropriate in C&C... At least I feel a little comfortable now (touch wood) that I have a workflow that I may be able to use on all the images that need it - there are others of the eagles I want to put together in a series.

Some more from Cradle Mountain.

The two panoramas are stitched panoramas using Photoshop Elements.

These "unusual" German style chairs obvoiusly don't appeal to everyone ;-)
Here's another phone snapshot showing them on a beach all in more or less straight lines, you can also clearly see the numbers you mentioned.
They are quite big an roomy inside, you can adjust them to put your feet up and there's a side table for the beer glass ;-)
Since it is quite windy in the region the high walls make them pretty comfortable.

A typical english version also has its charm, as in this image from the internet ;-)

I guess that all software packages have their own idiosyncrasies and learning curves. I've always found the noise reduction and sharpening in ACDSee to be pretty good. In the past, several years ago, in cases where I had a huge amount of noise I would start developing an image in ACDSee then at the end of that process I would start an external editor like Topaz denoise (from inside ACDSee) and make the final noise & sharpening part in that editor. Pressing save in Topaz brought you back to ACDSee. So that was relatively seamless.
In the meantime, the sharpening and Noise reduction has improved in ACDSee, and I also take precautions as far as possible to create RAW images with less noise and find that ACDSee works very well without external editors. It does depend on your settings and it is needs to be adjusted with a certain amount of "feel"
There are some tutorials in You tube.
One tip with sharpening is to change the mask setting, while pressing the ALT key.
This will show you (with a B&W outline image) what parts of the image will be sharpened. As you increase the mask setting, the lower grey levels will turn black in that view and will not be sharpened. Eg. if the clear sky is noisy and you sharpen it it will look worse. But if the mask is increased so that the sky looks smooth and mostly black when viewing the mask, then that noise wont be sharpened and you'll get a better result.

That's funny... 👍

That Light-EQ tool is even better if you select mode = "Standard" instead of "Basic". Then select 9 bands and you can now brighten and darken 9 separate brightness levels in the image with those two sets of sliders. For realistic results best to adjust the bands gently and smoothly.

There would have been very little point in taking just one photo and no more.

This is exciting. Are we witnessing the birth of a whole new genre to rival the Lonely Park Bench affectionados? Are bathing boxes acceptable in the new category? The German chairs seem to be a bridging step.

I understand ETTR. It is good to know about if there are likely to be shadows one will raise in pp.
However, action shots require point and shoot. There isn't any time to check exposure latitude, although with the perched shots yes. As a relative newbie, when presented with scenes like these, the moment tends to capture me and I may lose my composure - puns intended. A bit of theory certainly helps, but I think experience is the best teacher.

Agreed - all the theory often goes out the window in the "excitement" of the moment

Tim

But the theory is meant to be put into practice during the preparation and setup. It's too late if you wait until the "excitement" of the moment.