6 Ways to GET the BEST Image QUALITY Possible, Including Tips with the Gear You Have!!

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i want to have a chat about image quality i want to share with you how to get the best possible image quality with the gear that you have i want to show you how i went from this shot to this shot without spending a cent i know i've been reviewing some of canon's cameras recently i want to emphasize that the camera alone is only one piece of the image quality puzzle so i believe just about any modern camera is capable of taking really good shots to prove that point let's take a look an example here are two shots of a jackie winter one taken with my sixty dollar ten megapixel 40d and the other with the two and a half thousand dollar r6 clearly the r6 is the superior sensor by a long way but both these shots look pretty similar in terms of iq and can you tell which is which or which image do you actually prefer when i look at them i actually preferred the first image i just prefer the overall feel to it i like the perch i really like the background color the other shot's still a nice shot but i definitely prefer the first one would it surprise you to learn that the image i actually like the best was taken with my 40d so how can that be how can a 60 camera even compete with a two and a half thousand dollar camera well it's because the camera is only one of six important factors when it comes to image quality so what are those six factors i hear you asking well they are the light the lens the distance to the subject the sensor the exposure and post processing and the exciting thing is three of these things won't cost you a cent so when i talk about image quality with birds ideally we want lots of feather detail and to be nice and sharp that's what i'm going for all right the first thing that impacts image quality is the light so my understanding is is that the camera needs light reflecting off the subject to get nice contrast and nice colors which results in more detail being captured so if you don't have enough light reflecting on the bird or it's very flat you're going to struggle to get those details let's take a look at an example of a photo in very poor light i was using my old 7d crop body and was extremely overcast with very dull light as you can see the image is very flat and if we zoom in the lack of detail and quality is obvious now it didn't matter what lens or camera i used in this situation the resulting photo was always going to be poor now fast forward six months same camera same lens but this time i had glorious morning light same species and i was able to capture this photo so the image comes to life with the early morning sun giving us lots of contrast detail and color i was also a little bit closer and the exposure was much better the difference between the two images is enormous and the biggest change was simply the light all right here's another example from my recent trip to melbourne i actually photographed these little hooded plovers once when it was heavily overcast and once when we had morning sun now you can see these two files side by side what a difference it makes because i had light in one of them i was able to use iso 1600 but in the overcast conditions i had to bump my iso up to 6400 to get the shutter speeds and by doing that you're obviously going to introduce a little bit more noise and i think the birds actually got better image quality even though the bird is further away it's just that nice light that's helping us in this situation now i don't want you thinking that you can only shoot when the sun's out that's not quite the case often when you have enough ambient light so you've got just you know a little bit of cloud or there's just a lot of light about or possibly using flash or some other means you can get really nice shots and as you can see with the shot of this mulger parrot sometimes slightly overcast conditions can actually work because it creates a bit of a diffuser and i often enjoy slightly overcast clouds when you're in the forest because your backgrounds are often nicer so if you're having trouble with your iq often one of the cheapest and simplest ways is just to wait till you have nice conditions and nice light and head out and shoot then all right so probably one of the biggest factors in image quality is the lens and there's no getting around this with bird photography you need focal length so you need a lot of zoom and without decent focal length and without a decent lens you're really going to struggle to get nice shots all right so the very first lens i ever had was the 70 to 200 and i got this before i even started birding and when i took my first bird photograph it was with this lens so it's a non-is 70 to 200 cannon and i knew immediately that i needed more focal length so i thought the obvious thing would just be to get a two times converter and put it on this so i bought an old two times which turns this into a 140 to 400 and i thought that would be the answer to all my issues and i thought i was instantly going to get really nice shots with this however i was sadly mistaken so the first shot i took with the 70-200 and the two times was this new holland honey today and i remember looking on the back of the camera thinking oh how good is this i had the bird isolated it just looked like a nice shot but then i got it home put it on the computer and took a closer look and i was pretty unhappy with just how soft this was now i was shooting wide open which is a no-no when you're using zoom lenses with converters so that played a part but overall just the older lens and the older converter they just weren't up to it the image quality of subsequent shots was just always slightly soft and i was never happy with the final results and ultimately that two times was just a complete waste of money and i'm sure many of you have probably made that mistake as well so i ultimately did lots and lots of research i wanted the sharpest lens possible as you all know i ultimately went with the 400 5.6 because this was the sharpest lens that i could buy with the money i had it wasn't super expensive it was affordable and i was really hoping that this would be the lens which would enable me to take photos of birds and luckily it was this version is extremely sharp and i've used this for years and years still use it and still get lots of nice shots so the difference in iq was almost immediate i think one of the very first sessions i had was with this kookaburra i took a number of shots when i got home on the computer i zoomed in and i just couldn't believe it i was just so happy that i was finally able to take some shots that had some better sharpness from that day forward i was just getting lots and lots of nice shots here's another shot of a new holland honey heater and you can see the difference is just remarkable that 405.6 made all the difference so what lens should you start off with or buy well that's a really hard decision with the canons i would suggest the 100 to 400 or the new rf 100 to 500 with nikon maybe the 200 500 sony the 200 to 600 and with the olympus the 300 f4 gets a lot of good press so i know they aren't cheap but they you really need to save your money and invest in a quality lens if you want to take nice bird photographs and my advice would always be to upgrade that lens before you upgrade the camera for sure now the ultimate lenses of course are the big primes they just have amazing image quality they're really really fast but with that comes a lot of weight they're quite heavy and they're super expensive and out of reach of most people but i want to reassure you that you don't need one of these big primes to get nice shots and hopefully i've shown that in my budget gear challenge video in my video last week with the canon 6 and 800 f11 lenses you can definitely get nice shots without these super expensive lenses all right so that moves us on to the distance to subject and this is probably the thing that will make the biggest difference to your image quality i think a lot of people crop very heavily or they just can't get close and then they wonder why their images just lack detail and quality if you have to crop your image a lot or you the bird is tiny in the frame it doesn't matter what you do that image quality is just never going to quite be there i can't stress how important it is to get the bird big in the frame so for example if you take a look at this red cap robin shot i quite like the wide habitat feel to this you know but the bird was tiny now if i was to crop heavily on the bird it still looks okay but we're just missing the fine feather detail and i just wouldn't be happy with the shot if that was my framing now i used the same lens the same camera the same bird but i was able to get much closer on this next shot and you can just see how much detail we've now captured you know we've got fine feather detail it just looks fantastic and that's just purely because of the change in the distance i was to that bird so how do we get close well unfortunately it can be very very difficult and i understand how hard it can be especially in countries where birds just don't tolerate humans however the obvious way is just your focal length so the focal length is kind of how much zoom you have the more focal length you have the bigger the bird's going to be and the more zoom you have so with birding i would generally suggest has a minimum of about 300 on a aps-c or a crop body and 400 on a full frame anything smaller than that and you're just going to be struggling now just to give you a comparison of what a difference it makes on the screen this is a shot of a jackie winter at 70 millimeters so quite wide at 70 millimeters the bird's tiny you can see the background huge depth of field and you'd really struggle to get a nice bird image at 70 millimeters now if you compare that to about 1120 millimeters full frame equivalent which is quite a lot the bird is now massive and it's almost filling the frame so what a difference between 70 and 1120 with 1120 i'm eight meters away and the birds full frame and that's the advantage of having lots of focal length and the second way to make the bird bigger in the frame is just to get physically closer now there's a few different strategies you can employ you can try and find tame birds that'll let you get close you know setting up hides set up next to water features mealworms there's a few different ways of getting the birds closer to you just walking around the bush and approaching birds is very difficult and a very hard way to get nice shots so the next thing that's going to impact image quality is just your exposure and your settings i did a whole video on settings that you're free to check out which might help you in this regard so for every photo you take you have a choice of shutter speed aperture and iso and these three things can change quite a bit for any single exposure and it's up to you as the photographer to make the decision do you want higher shutter speeds or do you want less depth of field or more depth of field and then the iso obviously will increase or decrease the amount of noise that you're kind of getting in your images and this can be a little bit difficult and will vary from photographer to photographer but the rule of thumb generally is the higher your iso the more noise and the less image quality you're going to have now there are a number of factors here the camera the light you have the color of your background whether it's underexposed or overexposed there's lots of factors but on the whole the ice higher the iso the higher your noise is going to be and you can see that with this comparison image so the bird on the left used a very high iso of 3200 whereas the bird on the right used an iso of around 1600 and you can see what a difference it makes even to the color and the contrast and the detail it's quite vast the image the 3200 image is pretty much almost unusable even though it was taken with the same camera the same lens on the same perch it's just the settings made that much of a difference now it's also important to know that the type of camera whether it's full frame crop and the differences these will make with iso and you will know that so with my 7d which is a really old canon crop body the maximum iso i used to want to go on that is 1600 that would actually have a fair bit of noise and i'd much prefer 800 however my r6 i can now go to 12 800 and happily shoot at that and even 6400 so my newer r6 has almost got three stops more iso capability than the old 7d so the type of camera you have will influence these settings basically what that means is if you've got an older camera that doesn't handle high iso very well you're going to have to use lower shutter speed using lower shutter speeds often leads to soft or blurry images which of course impacts your image quality so with this eastern yellow robin on the side of a tree i was shooting with a 7d at iso 1600 i had to use a very low shutter speed of 1 60th of a second just to get a shot now obviously in a burst i got one sharp but the majority of them were soft like this one and ultimately you'd end up missing a lot of shots if you're having to use that low of a shutter speed and we also have to be sure that we don't under or over expose our images if we under expose our images heavily that is that too dark when you increase the exposure in the shadows in post you're going to introduce a lot of noise and your image quality will drop if you over expose the image that is it's way too bright you're going to blow all the details in the bright parts of your image and you won't be able to recover those and it also impacts heavily on the color of the image so i highly suggest trying to get your exposure right that will definitely help improve your image quality all right so that brings us on to the sensor or the camera how important is that when it comes to image quality well in poor conditions it's very important when you've got nice light not so much these new cameras just allow you to get shots that you just couldn't dream of with older cameras and this was apparent when we went into the rainforest recently and photographed these eastern yellow robins we were shooting at isos of 12800 which is really high compared to my old cameras and we were still able to capture images that i am very happy with this has just opened up more possibilities than i've ever had before again you don't have to have the latest sensor to capture nice shot they just make it a lot easier to do so and newer cameras have better dynamic range that just means you can lift the shadows or decrease the highlights and still maintain really good detail so the larger megapixel cameras such as the r5 or the d850 these just allow you to crop quite heavily and still maintain relatively large files and that's another advantage of the sensor so the final step on improving your image quality is your post processing i find the processing is just the final step in this digital workflow if you don't process your images you're doing them a real disservice in my opinion take a look at this kookaburra shot the raw file is very flat it's missing colour and it's just not how the scene looked i would never use an image straight from the camera as you're letting the camera apply the post processing within the camera it sets the white balance the sharpness the contrast the camera is doing the processing and we don't want that we want the control of how that final image is going to look and to do that i use lightroom which i use for my raw converter where i adjust those sliders to change the exposure the highlights the white balance et cetera each camera manufacturer has their own raw converters which you can use often for free i would highly suggest having a look at how your raw converter changes the look of your image now the final step for me is to use photoshop now i know there's a huge steep learning curve when it comes to photoshop there's lots of different things that photoshop excels at and i highly suggest looking at some youtube videos on that so now i'm very open about how i process my images i'm quite happy to share the raw file and the final photo i'm not trying to deceive anyone and ultimately all these photos that i process are for me are for my personal enjoyment and i'm happy to share those with others and i think everybody should have that creative freedom to do what they like they just need to be really honest about it and don't forget that processing is not going to make a bad image good it's just going to make a good image better so the three things that are going to improve your image without costing you anything is to shoot a nice light get as close as you can to the subject and of course try and get the right settings those three things are going to drastically improve your images all right so back to that image i showed at the start of those pacific black ducks how did i go from that terrible image to the good image well let's have a look at that bad image this was taken on my r6 and 500 f4 with a 1.4 converter however i got to this location quite early and the sun hadn't come up so the background was sort of dark water didn't have direct sunlight the bird was actually a fair distance away and when i took this shot it was underexposed and unfortunately it just has very poor image quality now fast forward 45 minutes the sun's come up the birds come close to me i've rattled off a number of shots and boy look at the difference in the two images the new image where the bird was much closer and nice light and better exposed this just looks ten times better the image quality pops so the gear didn't change but the image looks a lot different and i hope this gives you some confidence going forward with your own gear that if you can try these things hopefully your image quality will improve alright well i hope you enjoyed today's video and i hope these things are going to help you improve your image quality let me know in the comments below what you find helps the most if you like this content give it a thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos a big thanks to all the members that directly support the channel if you want to support the channel and help me to make more of these videos check the links below i definitely appreciate that direct support all right thanks again and see you in the next one see you later

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 58,016

Rating: 4.9859533 out of 5

Keywords: Canon R6 Review, Canon mirrorless cameras for wildlife photography, Bird Photography, Canon lenses for bird photography, Bird Photography Tips & Tricks, Canon R6 for birds?, Canon R6 photography tips, Canon RF 800 f/11, Canon RF100-500 f7.1, Canon RF Telelphoto Lenses, Canon Zoom Lens For Wildlife, How to improve image quality, how to improve your wildlife photos, How to take better photos, Wildlife Photography Tips, Post Processing, how to take photos of birds

Id: eDXlDFlk_-Y

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021