Although I reported my findings at CD Park this morning (consisting of nothing special) on "Toronto Sightings", I've also now posted herein another frame of a male Yellow warbler because this shot was not processed with global noise-reduction as was the previous shot. I mitigated the pixel noise from shooting at ISO 2000 by using hand tools in photoshop. Global NR tends to have a take-no-prisoners approach to reducing gritty noise, thereby rendering the effect on the bird itself as if it was applied with a trowel. While a hand job is time-consuming compared to global NR it does allow some discrimination, delivering stronger NR to the background and foreground and less smear on the bird itself. When I previewed the image on the camera's back screen I was please that the image was properly focused. It looked pretty good. The screen does not show the noise as it appears on a laptop screen and therefore the capture looked a lot less pleasing when I got it home. Focal NR using hand tools in PS gave me something cleaner than preset global applications. I think this shot of the same warbler on the same perch is better using focal NR tools. I suppose the real question is ... besides me, who really cares.
420 mm @ f5.6 @ ISO 2000 w/o global NR, but done manully.