Red CrossBill

The detail looks great to me, Keith! For this image, the large crop enabled a really interesting view of this bird. It's quite something to see the details on the bill and feathers as well as the color gradations. For large crops we do need to be careful of noise levels because everything is magnified. I think examining noise at 1:1 during any NR is the way to deal with that. I see no noise issue here. It's worth noting that at the 1992 pixel x 1332 pixel size you could make a print 6.6" x 4.4" at 300 pixels/inch. If you want to print larger than that I would recommend Perfect Resize 7 (OnOne Software) or Blow Up 3 (Alien Skin Software). We've had lively discussions about cropping over years here. It was once pointed out that ethically getting close to a bird and avoiding a large crop is a mark of a good nature photographer. After that I met birders who complained about photographers disturbing birds by approaching too close. Finally, I realized that someone with a really large lens would not need to approach as close as me for the same shot. So, at that point I've said "Nuts!". I'll post images that I like regardless of the crop! Anyway, nice shot!

Steve: Thanks for your comment. I'm not a fan of Perfect Resize or Blow Up 3 as the Bicubic interpolations in Photoshop work extremely well. I just took this image, Enlarged it to a print size of 16 x 23.927 inches at 300 ppi using Bicubic Smoother in CS6. In my original post, I said this image might not hold up to a large print.... well that statement was wrong. This image would hold up just fine at that size for a print. One of the keys to being able to pull off a big crop, then enlarge significantly is the original image. This image is extremely sharp out of the camera with very low noise, even at ISO 1000. I'm attaching a small section of the image from the 16 x 23 image. It probably won't appear quite as good on the web as my PSD file since I've had to smash it down with jpeg compression for web display, but hopefully this will give you a sense of what's possible. I did not apply any sharpening after resizing the image to the print size.

Quite an amazing demonstration of how a high quality image can survive resizing very well, Keith. I have previously compared CS5 with Perfect Resize and Blowup and could see a difference between CS5 and the other two for a particular image and quite a large resizing (I forget the details now.). The difference wasn't much though and CS6 is likely even better. It will be fun to keep comparing them in future. Incidentally, postings like yours should help to encourage people to look for causes of lack of sharpness other than cropping (e.g. lens quality for example). Figuring out the real causes helps us to learn how to improve our photography.

Keith, I agree with your second statement about this WILL hold up for a large print. Thanks for giving us that have not played around with the 5D III yet a chance to look at some quality on large crops. I have seen many on this forum talk about the Nikon D800 this way and was wondering how the new Canon product performed.

As far as any other discussions on cropping, I think to each his own, I get tired of everybody telling everyone else judging other people's decisions on stuff like this with photography. For me...as long as the subject is not harmed or put in danger....a good image is a good image....period!

Interesting, Keith. Did you apply NR to the background? I see a bit of color noise in a very few places, but overall it is very impressive. The grey area behind the ear, for example. But I could never bring this off with my E-5.

I really appreciate the details you decided to emphasize with your crop. It works well and looks beautiful.

The fine details seen in such a large crop are awesome. Thanks for showing us Kieth. Great bird too!

Ken Archer

The tight crop works very well in this image. It gives an excellent view of the very curved bill.
May