DSLRUsers.com

After some advice from a few of the friendly folk here on the forum I thought I would FORCE myself to move away from ISO 200.

These are taken with the Sigma 180 Macro using SB800 With Lightsphere at ISO 1000.

The first is a half crop and the second is a full shot. The noise was cleaned up with Neatimage plugin in Photoshop CS.

1/160s @ f/18


1/200s @ f/18

Now that lens is starting to show it's worth. Very nice Mark.

great......... I want that lens......... soon

Yes Mark they are starting to look good and a lot sharper you need to print them @A3+

mitedo wrote:Yes Mark they are starting to look good and a lot sharper you need to print them @A3+

he will need a good Canon A3 printer....... I am sure you can help.......

that is pretty amazing for ISO 1000! Can you share an image before NeatImage was used as matter of interest?

Slider - I trust your attempt to go that high in ISO was so you could get some DOF?? I note you still had some spare room with speed and could have kept to 800 or less. There are some parts where the noise reduction looks a bit funny in the first photo. The shots themselves were great - awesome close-ups.

Strweth there's some good macro/bug shots posted here... This is terrific... Those eyes!

Did you lose much detail with the NR?

Great work Mark. See, ISO can be your friend - if you let it

I'd be interested to see that shot again, only with the SB800 and ISO200.

The SB800 is one magnificent piece of lighting equipment....

How much NR did you use in NeatImage ?

Here's a tip that may be of some use - I often duplicate the background layer, then perform the NR on the copied layer. From here, you can play with the opacity so you can "dial the NR back", so to speak...

OR you can tweak the settings before hitting the "apply" button.... I find my way easier (for me anyway)

really like the detail in the eyes of this one.
you can see the little hexagons now.
I noticed that the eyes were a tad hot previous to these images.
I am assuming that the lightsphere diffusing the flash has produced this.
Were your previous efforts using the lightsphere also??

Steve

I rarely shoot at anything greater than ISO800, because the colours shift quite dramatically at these levels.

Your shots are very nice at ISO1000. As remarked before, the detail captured is WOW.

Aussie Dave wrote:Here's a tip that may be of some use - I often duplicate the background layer, then perform the NR on the copied layer. From here, you can play with the opacity so you can "dial the NR back", so to speak...

As an addition to that...

When using a seperate layer it is also possible to use layer masks with different opacities. That way you can eliminate the background noise completely in OOF areas where it doesn't matter if you loose some detail... then in the more detailed parts of the image you can either use no noise reduction or just a limited amount (using opacity in the mask) to get the desired nose/detail level.

Paul

LostDingo wrote:that is pretty amazing for ISO 1000! Can you share an image before NeatImage was used as matter of interest?

No problem, Here is the original untouched apart from crop.



Thanks for all the comments and tips folks. I will have to get more familiar with layers and how to manipulate them Looks like some great new ideas to try out.

WOW Mark this is great, very very well done.

just comparing the image before and after neat image.
Is hard to imagine that they are the same image!!
Still trying to come to terms with PP in general.
I wonder if you could step thru the steps you took to get from the noisy one up to the finished article??

Steve

WOW Mark - bloody brilliant - the detail in the crop is amazing!!!!
I'm going to stop taking shots of dragonflies now - you are the king
Rel

avkomp wrote:just comparing the image before and after neat image.
Is hard to imagine that they are the same image!!
Still trying to come to terms with PP in general.
I wonder if you could step thru the steps you took to get from the noisy one up to the finished article??

Steve

OK I just went through the process again to make sure of the steps.
Here you go

1. Adjusted exposure -1/2 stop
2. Bumped saturation up +10

3. Cropped

4. Ran Neat Image - just let it do it thing automatically

5. Selectively enhanced the hue, brightness and more saturation on the yellow parts of the insect body.

6. Still wasn't happy with noise so I ran Neat Image again

7. Ran USM 200/.5/0 to enhance the wing structure

8.Ran Double Matt Frame action which resizes for web posting

Looks Good Mate...

These are great Slider. Just be careful as Neatimage will reduce detail. While it might not be possible for insects with translucent wings, but for birds I do tend to select the background and feather it and then run a more aggresive noise reduction than what I would on the subject.

Slider wrote:

LostDingo wrote:that is pretty amazing for ISO 1000! Can you share an image before NeatImage was used as matter of interest?

No problem, Here is the original untouched apart from crop.



Thanks for all the comments and tips folks. I will have to get more familiar with layers and how to manipulate them Looks like some great new ideas to try out.

Slider. I really appreciate that and you taking time out to share! You have done well and should also be a spokesman for NeatImage

Amazing stuff Mark. I also am surprised at the quality of the high ISO image but that aside the images are clean, crisp, well composed and clearly demonstrative of great technique. Your last set also shows good application of PP skills. You and the lens are one.
cheer
marco

thanks for that slider

It was even more useful showing the intermediate stages of the process.
It still amazes me the power we all have on our PCs these days, with software (and knowhow of course) to turn stuff like the original noisy image to something great.

Steve

Mark - Love the shot, but really appreciate the great step by step of how you got to the finished product.