First post......testing...testing!!

Digital Delite · 1 Oct 2013

Hi
I met a member of this site at The Hawk Conservancy this morning who explained some of the benefits of "Talk Photography" so I thought I'd give it a try.
The light was poor and so ISOs were on the rise in order to use a suitable shutter speed for hand held shooting.
I have processed this image and applied noise reduction to suit my eye. Could I do better?

(maybe a before and after would help but I need to keep it simple first time round)

Digital Delite · 1 Oct 2013

Well that didn't work and for me attaching photos is both frustrating and time consuming. And at 800 pixels max the resolution is not good enough for judging an image.

russellsnr · 1 Oct 2013

Was going to welcome you to the forum here that is full of people who will help out when a problem arises but you do not even introduce yourself and then you complain about something that everyone else has been happy with for a long, long time.
If you are not happy with what we have to offer then go elsewhere.
Russ

Furtim · 1 Oct 2013

The image on google you are linking too is protected so even if you type the link in manually, you can't see the picture. That may be the issue.

Once that's fixed, judicious use of the right tags will give access.

Link to the image you embedded.

https://plus.google.com/photos/108909382790529014980/albums/5929835149152819809?banner=pwa

Same link in the necessary tags.

Digital Delite · 2 Oct 2013

Russ I apologise for getting frustrated at my first attempt at posting on this site. Stupidly I had not made my link available for viewing other than by me. You will realise by now I'm not a whizz on computers.
Here is the link again.......oh! I hope it works.
I still think 800 pixels is too small for a meaningful critique.

Regards John

Furtim · 2 Oct 2013

It's google making your image hard to share as it's wrapping it in too many layers. If you click on the zoomed picture in google, copy link, and then insert an image into a post and past the URL which will look something like (note it's ending in jpg, so you finally have the image URL rather than a frame or window code snippet).

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-...AAABSiE/NqAoFWkfbY0/w800-h516-no/DSC_0406.jpg

You will end up with...

Furtim · 2 Oct 2013

As for the image, it's a little dark on my end. I'd be tempted to push the highlights a little and stretch the histogram to push the whites toward white and the black towards black. 30 sec edit below (although I think I forgot to turn off the batch sharpen action I have so now it's over-sharpened so ignore that!)

Lovely sharp image to start with though.

Photo (2 of 2).jpg by Furtim!, on Flickr

Digital Delite · 2 Oct 2013

Thank you David. I think I agree with you on all counts. One problem I have is with the brightness control on my monitor. I have a Mac and usually view and process my images at the mid point of the screen brightness scale.
Noise was my main concern and I think that looks even better on your version. Post processing is my greatest weakness!! (note I said "greatest")
On a general note TP have a size limit on uploads. Does that apply to online images such as this? I would like to present my stuff bigger!
Cheers John

Furtim · 2 Oct 2013

If you host your images on something like Flickr, you can put up links to 'medium' images (which are 800px wide), but when you click on the image, it will take the viewer through to Flickr and you can see the image in a variety of resolutions.

Other hosts offer the same, not sure about Google though.

Another tip is to get a screen calibrator such as Spyder 3 or 4. I also use a Mac, and just running this once every couple of months does the trick.