Cedar Waxwing

Like the colours. For noise reduction I have been using the Neatimage plugin for a while with good results.

nice looking shot, Joe. I like the vertical perch, pose, and berry in the bill. nice details in the bird too. I think you're right that ISO 400 would have worked out better, but this is still really nice. I'm mostly a NR novice so hopefully others will have better advice. I don't do anything special, just mess with the sliders in PS.

A beautiful shot Joe. I'd back of on the saturation a touch, and is there any way to get detail in the blacks using curves, or the shadow highlight tool ?
Good to see you got the red hue of the eye too. I often use flash when photographing Waxwings as it really brings that eye out.
Neat Image is a great tool for cleaning up BG's.

Joe this is a lovely image of one of my favorite birds. Ok these are a few of my suggestions. First I would of used an aperture of f/7.1 or f/8 to get the birds tail in focus and since your BG appears far enough away to not bother, As far as the noise reduction goes, I us Niksoftware's Define. It is a plug in for Photoshop. I would use it selectively on the BG. The program uses control point technology so no layers and masking need to be known about. And lastly I would, as Nick suggests, back down on the greens saturation. Well done on the timing of the capture!

Beautiful capture! What a terrific pose and setting. Agreed on a lot of the suggestions here, but I think the image you have is great and some of the little nits are easily fixed.

For noise, I use Noise Ninja (plug-in for Photoshop). I'm quite happy with it. Easy to use with a shot such as this. Much better to have as plug-ins for something like Photoshop, where you can use Photoshop tools to select the background, and then run the noise-reduction software.

Joe, Neat Image makes a plug-in for PS as well. I use it every once and a while on BGs and it works really well. It would make the BG of this image so much nicer IMO.

Joe, I love the comp on this shot and think aq couple of small changes others already suggested would make a huge differenrce...especially getting more detail in the blacks. I just started using NIK Define for NR. Love it. Very simple and very, very effective.

Nice action shot, and I really like the perch. I'm also not a sharpening pro. However, I sometimes select just the background and selectively do some NR on it so there's still more detail in the subject. Really nice image though!

Really nice image with the berry in mouth. Definitely worth some nr on the bg only. Nice rich colors and great pose. Sharon

I'm so jealous. This is great and I don't have one yet.( I say yet). Joe, my only nit as you have mentioned is the noisy BG. I use Noiseware Pro from Imagenomic and I like it. You could probably just do selective NR in the bg . I love that berry in the mouth.

This is very nice - I don't bother with "Noise" much.

Gorgeous composition, Joe. The noise isn't bad. If you're going to use Photoshop's noise reduction, you definitely have to select only the bg, because you'll lose some detail. In my opinion, some of the aftermarket noise reduction packages are much better and worth the money. I can shoot a couple of extra iso ranges higher and feel comfortable that the software will take care of the extra noise.

A great capture, Joe. Very nice pose, setting and background. The fruit in the beak is a bonus! About NR I use NoiseNinja plugin but here it doesn't bother me.

Nice perch, colors and BG. I have photographed quite a few of these birds this spring (though I haven't got any that are this good so far) and they always seem to have a berry of some kind in their mouth.

Nice one, Joe. Great color combinations and detail.

Love the vibrant colours Joe - lovely perch and berries

cheers
Rob

Great shot of a bird that can be difficult because of its subtle color. I think that the background noise isn't too bad though I do find it a bit bright (oversaturated?). I use Noise Ninja (PS plug in) which works well & is easy to use.