Thanks Mike and Jay, I’m pleased that you enjoyed looking at the photos – we had a great day out whilst taking them. We ended up discarding 100’s of failed efforts that were just out of focus, plane of focus in the wrong point in the frame, subject flown leaving an empty space, etc. Oh the joys of digital!
To reduce the out-of-focus background noise of the dragon fly, this is what I did in Photoshop CS3:
- Created a duplicate image from the cropped original.
- Applied the median noise filter (default) to the duplicate which smoothed the background.
- Copied and Pasted the duplicate median image as a new layer.
- Selected “Multiply” as the mode of combining in the original photo Window.
- Set opacity to 50%.
- Flattened the Layers.
I also noticed that this amplified the green colour of the head, but without it appearing too artificial.
Cheers
Dennis