This is a female red-legged honeycreeper I captured in Costa Rica. What is remarkable about this image is that, because of the extremely low light environment, I had to use 25,600 ISO. The noise was bad enough to make the picture, essentially, unusable. In addition, the small bird was quite small in the frame. I cropped the image from 60 megabytes down to 13 megs to get the composition I really wanted. Then, I applied Topaz DeNoise AI followed by Topaz AI Gigapixel. The two software programs eliminated the noise brilliantly and enlarged the file perfectly. Now this looks like it has not been manipulated at all. This is the shot I wanted in the first place, but due to the dark conditions and the limitations of our equipment, I had to use post-processing techniques to save an otherwise failed image. My settings for the honeycreeper were 1/2500, f/6.3, and I used a Canon 500mm f/4 lens for the shot. I would have preferred a faster shutter so the wing tips were tack sharp -- with small birds, 1/4000 is ideal -- but I didn't have enough light.
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