Flight photos technique VS still photos (1 Viewer)

Well tried things out more today. So far everything is working well for now. I shot in RAW only, downloaded photos and then later shot in RAW again and then towards end switched back to RAW + JPG. I compared the efforts, yep got it all to download both raw and raw +jpg..whew! I do see where the RAW photos were a tad better then the compressed jpg photos. Some looked the same but most of them easy to see a difference. So everything good so far I have actually leaped forward into taking RAW photos and downloading them successfully!

Next I experimented with the programs I have for the RAW photos. Zoom Browser will open them but I can't crop etc. I opened up a program that came with camera called
Digital Photo Professional and it did let me crop, change other things and convert to jpg. Sounds good eh? Well...I'm a slow learner here so bare with me. The results after cropping was horrible..way to much noise in photo. I am having a hard time with my photos with sharpening for a crisp clean look to getting noise out. My subjects are reasonably close..3 feet to 15 feet away. If I clean the noise up photo is too soft, if I sharpen noise again...AHHHHH. Weather, light all seem to be fine. before I thought I have to get closer to get subjects to help with all this, which I have. I can be still as a mouse and have sparrows coming right up to me in my yard but I am still not getting an end result with the photo that I like.
I'll admit the photos are better then what my Canon S3 did by a long shot. My question is how does one work with the RAW photo to pull the even better result? What steps do you all use that may help me? As for quality maybe it is just the lens not being an L series, but if it is, be awhile before I can get one of those.

There is a tutorial on DPP here - http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=1228. It is for V3.2, which is slightly long in the tooth, with V3.5.2 being the current release, but should get you going pretty well.

I'm not sure why you should be struggling with noise if you have good light. In bright sunlight you should be able to use an exposure setting of something like....

f/5.6, 1/800, 100 ISO

That should give you virtually no visible noise, easily freeze the motion of birds just sitting and hopping about, but will push your lens to the limits due to the wide open aperture. If you want to give the lens an eaier time of it then try....

f/8, 1/800, 200 ISO, which should yield sharper images and still with noise all but absent.

It's worth noting that it is important to get your exposure correct, or at least not to underexpose. If you underexpose and then brighten the image in editing then you will amplify any noise, especially in the darker areas of the image. That is a strict no-no.

Have a look here - http://ronbigelow.com/articles/exposure/exposure.htm
and here - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml
for some information on the importance of exposing correctly, and for raw shooters the benefits of "Exposing To The Right".

Here is one of my photos processed in DPP. It was shot at 380mm, f/8, 1/250, 400 ISO in hazy light, not bright sunlight. It's not a very good shot, certainly not razor sharp, but I'm not seeing noise, even at 400 ISO.

The only edits were to set Picture Style = Standard (I shoot with Neutral Picture Style) and to set Sharpening = 3 (I shoot with Sharpening = 0). Noise reduction sliders were both at 0. First the full frame and then a 50% crop....

EDIT : I've just added a picture of a robin, and a 50% crop, this time shot with flash at 100 ISO, f/11, 1/250, 400mm. The only edits in DPP are as above - PS=Standard, Sharpening=3 (oh, and WB = Flash).

It's also worth pointing out that (over)sharpening is not a magic cure for photos that are out of focus or blurry. With my photos, when processing in DPP, I normally use Sharpening = 3 as my default setting but I'll go to 4 or 5 if I have to, 6 at the maximum. If I need to go any higher than that then I have to question whether the photo was sharp enough to keep.

Hi Tim, thank you for the examples and guidelines. I never thought of ISO 100 on a bright sunny day nor the 200 on a hazy day. I normally just use 400 so good to know. I"ll try these out on the next appropriate days. It is cloudy today so hope the sun comes out later. The sharpening numbers are good to know too so I have something to go by. I'm sure this information will be of help to everyone. I love the close up Robin photo, beautiful!

Update

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give a quick update on the photo problems of still birds that I was having. Everyone has been so helpful and I appreciate all the time I know it takes to figure out what is going on. A big thank you to all for your patience.

Through PM with Tim, he helped locate problems I was not aware of after looking at some of my Raw photos. Two of the suggestions, among others, was that he mentioned for me to turn off my HTP and to shoot in a lower ISO, 100 or 200. I went outside a bit ago and tried this out on close up birds. The difference from what I was getting to what I got today is stunning and very exciting to me. The photos are a lot clearer, showing details of the bird I didn't notice in older shots. When I zoomed in on photo in zoom browser the photo stayed clear..wow a first for me! Some were off a bit but that was due more to me but the large majority turned out great! I am now getting more detail of the bird and clearer shots. This is very exciting, still walking on cloud 10, since I was feeling so discouraged before this. I felt that something was so wrong but didn't know how to figure it out, drove me nuts!

I will add that as mentioned I still have things to work on with myself but the help I have received has made a big difference in my photos. I still have lots to learn but it's a good start to brighter days.

Thank you so much!

Raw

OK_Scissortail said:

still walking on cloud 10, since I was feeling so discouraged before this. I felt that something was so wrong but didn't know how to figure it out, drove me nuts!

I will add that as mentioned I still have things to work on with myself but the help I have received has made a big difference in my photos. I still have lots to learn but it's a good start to brighter days.

Thank you so much!

Click to expand...

Glad to see this issue is fixed. I see you are beginning RAW...would you mind posting or even send me photo's with the difference between RAW and JPEG> Do you feel it is worth the memory that RAW requires?

lmans66 said:

Glad to see this issue is fixed. I see you are beginning RAW...would you mind posting or even send me photo's with the difference between RAW and JPEG> Do you feel it is worth the memory that RAW requires?

Click to expand...

Imans, I suspect that other people could explain this better than me but here goes.

It is not so easy as comparing two shots.What Raw is all about is you taking full control of all the processing instead of letting the camera do it for you as in the case of jpeg.

If you were to take a Jpeg and Raw file straight from the camera and just converted the raw then the jpeg would probably look better because the Raw would be unprocessed whereas a jpeg has had the processing already done by the Camera. How good a converted Raw looks after processing is down to the processing ability of the person, you cannot really compare a jpeg and Raw in the way you suggest. Raw in itself is no guarantee to better images, you must have the processing abilities to take advantage of it.

Think of a Raw as a digital negative - a jpeg from the Camera has lost much of the original shooting information and what you get is what the Camera thinks you want. All the information tossed away when producing the jpeg is lost forever but the Raw file retains all the information as recorded at the time of the shot much like a film negative. It is down to you to develop this negative.
If you are not comfortable with some of the finer arts of processing and are not prepared to spend more time on the PC then Raw is not for you.

Read here for further reading on the subject which explains the advantages of Raw far better than I could.

Hope this helps.

Roy...perfect simple answer. Hmmm...sounds like a process but a time consuming one. I like the idea and might have to experiment with it but I am guessing that at the moment, it is experimental only. Appreciate the info... jim

Imans, Roy's answer is a good one. I was actually going to reply along similar lines myself.

In response to your comment above, shooting raw does not need to be time consuming at all, or even need hand crafted editing of any kind. You might be able to get away with simply running a batch process to convert all your raw files to JPEGs without any other human meddling.

For example, when you shoot with a Canon camera you have choices for camera settings such as Picture Style, White Balance, Sharpening, Saturation, Noise Reduction and some other things. When you shoot to JPEG these settings are applied to the data from the sensor to create the JPEG file. The raw data is forever changed within the camera. You can change the data further by editing but you can never get back to the state before the camera messed with the data. When you shoot to raw all those settings are saved as data fields in the raw file. They do not actually change the data at the pixel level at all.

If you open up your raw file in DPP it understands the values of those settings and will apply them before your eyes to the raw data to generate the image as though you had shot it that way in the first place as a JPEG. However, because you shot raw you can freely change any of those settings within DPP and the picture will be recreated with those adjustments applied. You can make such changes over and over and over again and the original pixel data is never changed. You are just changing the values of some data fields. If you like you can perform a couple of mouse clicks to restore a raw file back to the way it was originally shot.

So, if you process your raw files in DPP, without edits, they will look just like they would have if you had shot to JPEG in the first place. If you don't want to edit the files at all you do not have to. You can simply highlight th images you want to convert and press CTRL-B to bring up the batch process window. This will give you some basic options, such as destination folder, size and quality for your converted files. Depending on the speed of your computer it might spit out between 5-20 converted files per minute, so make a cup of tea or have a beer while you wait, or if you have thousands of images just leave them converting overnight.

You can use raw converters other than DPP, such as Lightroom, which is my preference. Lightroom completely ignores the camera parameters and applies its own default settings for picture style, brightness and contrast, sharpening and noise reduction. You can create your own edit presets or change the defaults to whatever you like. With my files, if I have shot an image well, all I normally need to do is tweak White Balance (I never bother to set it accurately before shooting because I always shoot raw). The rest of the adjustments can probably be left alone. If I need to correct an exposure error, or want to jazz up the image then I can do that within Lightroom, DPP or any other raw editor without harming the original raw file. But I only have to do such things if I want to, or if I screwed up. If I screwed up then rescuing a raw file is usually easier than rescuing a screwed up JPEG, especially if the problem is overexposure that has clipped highlight details such as sunlit white feathers, or severe underexposure (say 2 stops or more).

If you want more information on the merits or otherwise of raw vs JPEG then a Google for "raw vs JPEG" should yield plenty of (hopefully) helpful results.