Hi Gordon

Your image file is very small to start with, if you then crop out the section with the Raptor in it from the full photo you are left with an even smaller image file to work with. Increasing this very small file by interpolation only increases the pixel size making the resulting image very blocky, sharpening and noise reduction only help slightly on the original file before cropping, using these tools on the cropped image increases the halo effect making the image unusable.

There is no real substitute for making the original photo as large as possible, I don't know what camera you are using, but most allow for saving an image in RAW or JPEG Fine. Either of these are essential in wildlife photography and should enable you to pull out the maximum detail from your image, especially when enlarging only a small segment of the image.

I would have to say that it would be almost impossible to obtain a decent image from the photo you have submitted.

nirofo.

To be blunt I would give up on that one right now :)
There simply is not enough resolution in the original to make anything worthwhile out of. You are trying to make something out of image that is not up to it.

Now if you had a small image of say 640x480 pixels that contained mostly the bird and wanted to upsize to a printable files size, say 1600x1200 I would say not a problem and take the advice already offered, but, i'm afraid to say, with this image, you haven't a chance. :(

Yes I agree with Stephen you are asking too much of this image. But it is a good example to learn the limits of up sizing.

Dear all -
Thank you again for all your time and advice. As you all appreciate this was an extreme example! The eagle was over a mile away. I have now tried all your various suggestions and yes, there is obviously too little meat for a good result - and the constraints of PS 7. I have learnt a huge amount and had a lot of fun in the process.

The camera. Canon 1DS. 400 prime lens with 1.4 extender - hand held. The camera was set on jpeg fine producing afile size of 4.19mb

Really I am surprised there was an image at all!

nirofo - if you need a manservant to carry your tripod on your next adventure let me know!

Cheers - Gordon.

Hi Gordon

Yes it was asking a lot of the image you submitted!

Your camera and lens combo are more than up to the task of providing very usable images, providing you are not too ambitious. I would stick to RAW files if I were you, you can always make a JPEG out of them later if you really need to. You must try to get as close as possible to your subject, especially in bird photography where fine detail is usually required for identification purposes at least! There's no substitute for learning all you can about your subject and then applying fieldcraft to this knowledge to work yourself in close. If the subject is very far away then it's unlikely you will obtain a usable image from digital, there's usually too much noise in the file that is enhanced when a small section is enlarged, even with fine grained film such as Velvia, there is a problem when enlarging to the extent that the film grains become too large to hold on to definition.

Photoshop 7 is more than capable of rendering any digital image you can throw at it, most of the functions now in CS2 are in PS 7, admitted CS2 is geared more in favour of digital, the tools etc are slanted that way, however for the general digital photographer Photoshop 7 does the trick just fine. Many of the plugins that work for CS2 will also work for PS 7, there are many web pages where you can still download PS 7 plugins.

Thank's for your offer of being a manservant on some of my field trips, the state of my poor old back and aching joints could surely use some assistance on occasions. My burgeoning backpack doesn't seem to get any lighter, and it seems that sometimes I'm carrying 3 telegraph poles instead of a tripod, (must get one of those carbon fibre things and a magnesium head).

Keep up the submissions.

nirofo.