Today I took delivery of my first "proper" macro lens, a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM. Thanks to Brian Price for suggesting this months ago, it has great reviews and is excellent value for the quality images it produces.
Soon after it arrived I took a number of shots, still life, flowers and spiders. They were all hand held in good natural light but I wanted to make sure the shutter speeds were high as I could get so used 1600 iso.
This meant there was a some noise in the out-of-focus background, although it was not that bad.
On a number of shots I used TTS to soften and therefore Noise Reduce the background while at the same time sharpening the main subject.
Typically I selected the green background, used Radius 2, -300% and Tone+. Where the background had a range of tones I selected the subject tone, used a + percentage and used either Tone+ to blur the background or ticked Shadow Noise.
The various techniques show how versatile the QU editor is when using TTS.
3 samples are shown below and there's more here:
http://www.pbase.com/tjm04/macrocanon60aUsing TTS with a negative percentage
Using TTS and Shadow Noise
The spider's (2 different ones) bodies were 10 to 12 mm long (up to a half inch for Fred
)
Terry