Noise Reduction and Detail Enhancement

[DeMorcan]

Tina Bergstrom let me edit a photo she took of a Bald Eagle. This was a taken with a Panasonic 100-400 lens. Lens tests I have read show it softer at the 400 lens. I have a photo here of the ORF saved as a jepg and 1080 X867 crop I took from the photo. It has not been resized. I just wanted to see what detail I could pull from it. It slightly out of focus and not the best the lens is capable of. I could not get anything I liked in Lightroom. I added Studio 2 as a plug in. It does very good noise reduction and pulls out detail I cannot get from other programs. It does not use AI to add the detail like DeNoise AI and some other programs do. If printing at very large sizes a dedicated denoise program and sharpening program would be better. Studio 2 I have seen used on some edits of Rob Trek's photos. It does many other things. This is just an attempt to show why I use it for noise and sharpening. It is halo free (when used right) and add color contrast and micro contrast to the tools available in Lightroom. The lens softness showed up on the grass which is wonky. This was a preliminary edit to get something to work with. Further editing would be done to prepare it to be posted online. Here are the settings I used and how I pulled out some detail. I may make a crop from the ORF unprocessed and post it below if anyone is interested. I do want to point out that maximum detail is not the best photo. Most of photo editing is to hide some detail and lessen DR so the photo pops and looks. That is why this is just a starting point before editing for postings. Since it is Tina's photo, I did not want to put my look on it. What is below was written to Tina as she wanted to know what I did. Thank you again to Tina Bergstrom for letting me do this and allowing me to post it here. And Tina, when you read this, I did get the best part of the deal. I got to work on your fine photo.

Lightroom

My default sharpening:
Amount=60 Radius=0.5 Detail=25 Masking=60
I usually adjust the masking but 60 was fine.
I do not like sharpening and halos. So I never sharpen more and usually do not use detail in Studio 2 as they can give halos.

Exposure +1

Used an adjustment brush on the head at -100

Then edit it Studio 2


Studio 2:

AI Clear:
Noise=High
Detail=Low

Precision Contrast:
Large=0
Medium=15
Low=10
Micro=0
Lighting Midtone=+20
I usually do micrcontrast, but did not like the look this time. There are enough color variation that I did not do any color contrast to bring out subtle color differences. You may want to do as it was good on the Eagle, bad on the background. I could have made a second PC adjustment and just do micro detail on the bird or eye.

Precision Detail:
First I made a mask and masked out all but the head (100 on the head after inverting the mask). Then:
Small=19
Medium=25
I like the head but it did not match the body right. I did a 100 on the body but it stood out from the background. So I set the brush to 50 and put it on the body.
When I was done I lowered the opacity of the detail level to 80 so it drew attention but (IMO) fit as though it as in focus with modest dof.

Hit check to go back to LR.

Lightroom:
Temperature=+10 to warm up. Just cause I liked it a little warmer
Adjustment Brush @+50 on the reflection in the water.
I tried various things to raise the highlights on the head, but lost detail every time.

There is still a lot that can be done. Saturation and contrast to what you want to get any look you want. Or a B&W conversion or... Lots of things. But this is the basic to get detail in shot with natural edges and no halos. Facebook may sharpen some and add some contrast and saturation (or not, I have not figured it out). I cropped it 4X5 at 1080 in Lightroom before I started. If you want maximum crop with your zoom, this may get you started. Fine tune it all you want. There is no one best look.

Thank you for letting me process it and see just what detail was there.

[DeMorcan]

For those of you who use photoshop to compare lens, check dof of lens (whether there is more in focus either in front of or behind the lens), auto focus focus differences coming for a far focus vs from a near focus, field curvature, etc., here are the 2 detail maps of before and after processing. I did not show the whole photo but you can see the lens front focused. There was even more detail in the part I cropped off. For those who do not do this, darker areas mean more detail.