CH-47 Helicopter high contrast

[smisepr21]

Hi everyone:
Im new to the forum and also to photography. I am a acft mechanic and I took this shot recently while working at night. I didn't have a tripod, so I set the Camera on a pallet that was there on the side. I post edited the shot with PS elements 9 using a High contrast Look thechique I read in one of the books i have to learn photoshop. For the shot I used my Canon Rebel XS. I would like to know if the editing looks too heavy, And how can I avoid artifacts and the noise i was getting on the dark areas. All i could think was in a layer mask to brush away the noise by bringing the original black of the sky but im not shure if that was the right thing to do.

Exposure: Manual
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO:100
Focal Legh:18mm
Lens: EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
Flash: Did not fire

[Doug Sundseth]

The editing looks fine to me.

As to noise issues in the dark:

Long exposures will result in noise. If your camera has a long-exposure noise reduction feature, make sure it's active. You can also take several exposures and merge them in post to average out the per-pixel noise. BTW, this sort of noise tends to show up preferentially in dark parts of the photo because of the way that light is recorded by sensors.

It's worth attempting the same shot at several different ISO settings. Higher ISO increases noise as well, and at some point the high-ISO noise becomes more of a problem than long-exposure noise, but there may well be a minimum total noise at something other than the lowest ISO supported by your camera.

Any noise that makes it through will be enhanced by many sorts of high-contrast processing, so your post work might be increasing your problems.

For continuous tone areas like black sky, it's pretty easy to use a blur to even out the noise. Just select only the area you want to even out and add a Gaussian blur with a radius that looks good to you.

So, all that said, I really like the image you've captured of that Chinook. The shadows raking across the fuselage really work well in the composition. I might crop off a bit of the bottom, since the empty ramp doesn't help your composition much (IMO), but otherwise it's very nice.

[dlambert]

I really like that photo. The lighting creates some really cool shadows, and the black background and spotlighting on the helicopter is almost vignette-like. I'm not seeing the artifacts you're seeing as distinctly in this size, but if you're getting noise mainly in the black areas, yes - I think you should be able to do some editing just in those areas. Anyway, I really like the lines and colors here - well-done.

[smisepr21]

Thanks for your comments. I will definitely try the Gaussian blur to even out noise in dark areas. as for the artifacts go.. they where showing a little bit at the nose of the aircraft but it seems like it disappear when i downsized the shot in order to place the post. .. by the way this shot was a 6 sec exposure(I forgot to add that when i started the thread)

[mikoyan]

I actually like the picture as is....Very cool...