Raw Developer has for many years been a jewelry among developer available for the Sigma raw. I had many letters and raw files exchanged with the creator of RD and I can’t say how happy I am that we have native support for more or less all Sigma cameras to date. It’s NOT a perfect developer but it has a such neutral and natural view of colors that I feel is really hard to get using any other software.
These were post developed using Lightroom as a green shift on the right side of each shot was left untouched in RD. I had to add a touch of gradient filter to take it away. (a tiny amount of magenta).. I also lifted the chest of the bird in some shots and I switched off noise reduction in RD to further bring those colors out in the open – if you open them at full size you will see some of that.. :)
All shots shot between IS075- 1200 and of course taken with the Sigma 50-500 OS. Hand held.
This was shot using ISO400, I lifted the bird slightly so it’s a bit more ISO in terms of noise. Noise reduction is put at a minium so it’s quite noisy if you look really close. :)
These black and white ones has been heavily cropped and was both shot at very tricky light conditions.. ISO on camera was set to 800 but they had to be pushed some to get the right look. I shot using bracketing with a +0.7 setting to ensure some correctly exposed shots or a shot with useful sharpness. Noise reduction is completely turned off, which gives this really nice tone to the shot.
Tired of this little bird now are you? :D It’s funny how many angles you can find of a bird that only sits still for about a minute only to fly away and stay gone for an hour or two and when people decide to give up he shows again for another minute or so. The orchestra of shutters accompanying his arrival is such music and such fun!