[pcarfan]

Welcome to the 13th PP competition, High iso processing.

This shot was taken at the Cincinnati Zoo, inside the nocturnal exhibition in very dim light at iso 3200. It is underexposed as well. I would love to see what each can come up with. It would be nice if participants include the major PP steps involved, but it is not a requirement.

The generic Mediafire Account details for the PP challenge are as follows:
Mediafire Account Log-In Name: pentaxchallenge@yahoo.com
Password: postprocessing


Raw DNG file link (14.33 MB): High iso DNG

Full size Jpeg (14.57 MB): Challenge (1 of 1).jpg

[mithrandir]

I increased the exposure one stop and then processed it using Dynamic Auto Painter as a realistic oil painting.

[pcarfan]

mithrandir , a very nice entry, but I was also hoping for one of those "mithrandir pre-sets" for K-7 high iso images. Now, THAT would be awesome given your pre-set popularity in the forum.

[mithrandir]

mithrandir , a very nice entry, but I was also hoping for one of those "mithrandir pre-sets" for K-7 high iso images. Now, THAT would be awesome given your pre-set popularity in the forum.

I took a hour and came up with a preset to handle these high iso - low light shots in a zoo environment. I have had a few of these myself. Too much noise reduction would have also degraded what was left of detail so I went with a film grain look instead and a light touch of Noiseware noise reduction:

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Last edited by mithrandir; 12-09-2009 at 10:38 AM.

[pcarfan]

Mithrandir, ok we typed together, then thanks for the effort.

[foster]

I consider myself a total rookie at this, but I thought I'd take a shot.

I used Lightroom to do the following:

Bump the exposure up two stops
Add some vignetting
Used the adjustment brush to add sharpness to the cat's head
Did some split toning...darkened the reds in the shadows.

Edited to add: I did use some noise reduction in an attempt to rid the image of all the blue pixels.

[SWEngineer]

Lots of work put into this. And like last time, I 'undid' a lot of it in the final steps.

I worked off of the small JPG, so that might have been a benefit or handicap, I'm not sure. Steps in PS:

1. (Literally) split the image into Luminosity, Color, and Saturation layers
2. Color was a mess, so I used a Hue/Sat Adj layer to shift the nasty cyan / blue / magenta pixels to more yellow / orange / red colors on the color layer. I even hand painted some of the color.
3. Run 'reduce noise' and 'median' filters on the color and saturation layers with reduce noise only on the luminosity layer. You can get very aggressive smoothing out color and saturation w/o loosing detail. I masked the luminosity layer noise reduction so it only affected the background.
4. Masked Levels, Curves, and Hue/Sat layers to refine overall tonality and color. It now looked pretty good overall. So time to go backwards:
5. Crop, especially to reduce the eyesore on the L side of the image.
6. Cloned and Healed to eliminate the orange thing (log?) behind the animal. This undid a lot of my work in steps 2 & 3.
7. Masked Levels, Curves, and unmasked Color Balance Adj layers to get final tonality and color.
8. Masked Curves layer in "Multiply" mode to create a vignette. Flatten. Slight sharpening and its done.

Since this is from a nocturnal animal exhibit, my end result is really too bright to mimic a shot from the wild. So be it. Here's my entry:


And here's the image with the noise cleaned up before the cloning. NOT AN ENTRY:

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Last edited by SWEngineer; 12-12-2009 at 02:41 PM.

[ozlizard]

Bit of noise reduction in Topaz Labs, then back to LR for some more, contrast adjustment, vingette, back to PS for some sharpening, dodging and burning, more contrast adjustment.

[xs400]

Here's my entry.
Using PS Elements 6, I adjusted levels and contrast, cropped, sharpened, some dodge and burn
Neat Image noise reduction

[atupdate]

Way to many post processing steps to list but most had to do with masking/noise reduction.



Tim

[pcarfan]

This is going to be too difficult. It's a shame I can only pick three winners....(if any NR program was used, then mentioning that alone might help)

[wallyb]

Here's my go at it. I actually don't even have any noise-reduction software. I just worked on the jpeg file with gimp.

[pcarfan]

What! has everyone thrown in the towell, seeing all these great entires......come on now!....

[pcarfan]

Those who haven't done much noise reduction or any post processing and think it's too complicated, let me give you a link for the noiseware software that is FREE and easy to use.

Download the community edition here

NoiseWare Community Edition - Download

Then download my jpeg file I posted on the first thread to get the challenge picture.

Then open it in Noiseware and just press 'process' and see what it does. If you want to be a little more adventurous, choose the different presets like 'portrait'. landscape, night scene etc. and see what those do. If you want to go further try the slides.

Noise reduction is a battle between cleaning the noise on one hand, and keeping the detail on the other. Too much NR and the image looks like plastic. This will give a better understanding of why Pentax chooses to leave noise behind and the details behind so the user can decide what to do with it.

[wallyb]

Those who haven't done much noise reduction or any post processing and think it's too complicated, let me give you a link for the noiseware software that is FREE and easy to use.

Download the community edition here

NoiseWare Community Edition - Download

I, and many other people, don't use Windows