I was recently at Australia Zoo checking out the wonderful birds in the rain forest aviary. Being a rain forest environment it was, as expected, quite dark with resultant high ISO requirements.
One of the zoo staff came past with a beautiful Macaw which just need to be photographed.
I was using a D800 with a Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR but with a 2x tele converter attached. This meant that my maximum available aperture (wide open) was f/5.6. A reasonable shutter speed for the focal length was around 1/250s. End result - ISO 12800. Some noise was going to be inevitable.
So how to remove the noise from the soft blurred background but leave the detail in the feathers of the Macaw?
There are many ways this could be achieved but I chose a very simple layer method for this image.
I made some basic adjustments in Lightroom (exposure, shadows etc.) and then opened the image in Photoshop CC.
Using the Quick Selection tool I then made a selection of the bird, refined the selection, and then created a new layer from this selection by pressing Command + J.
The layers panel looked like this:
I made a copy of the original layer (Command + J) and then on the copy I then selected an area around the bird and removed this using Content-aware Fill (Shift + F5) .
The layers panel then looked like this:
I then selected this new background layer and applied noise reduction to this layer only. To soften the background a little more I then applied a soft blur to this layer.
End result a sharp bird (yes there is noise but it is doesn't overpower the image as it is camouflaged by the detail. Soft background with noise eliminated from the area where it was quite obvious.
Here are the before and afters.
Before background adjustments:
Final image:
My next Post-processing Bootcamp is in the Hunter Valley on the weekend of 7-8 May 2016.
Caboolture is on 11-12 June (sorry April booked out) and coming to Melbourne on 22-23 October 2016. Details (Brisbane) are here.
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