Great Blue Heron

Beautiful light, pose and perch, Allen. I'm on my work laptop with a horrible screen, but it looks like the brightest whites might be a bit hot. You can probably bring them down a bit in ACR. As for getting it to pop, the curves in either ACR or Photoshop can help a lot with that. There are more sophisticated methods, like luminosity masks, but the curves are a good starting point. The screen opens as a graph with a straight line. Click in the middle to put an anchor point. Click half way above that on the line and drag the point slightly upwards. Click half way between the middle and bottom and drag slightly downwards. It doesn't take much. Judicious use can sometimes make an enormous difference. You can play with it and see what happens.

Allen, this has some good things going for it--I really like the early light, the perch, the water, and the pose. What Dennis has suggested for adding a bit of contrast in curves is almost exactly what I typically do (except I don't use the middle anchor, just the two that are midway between the center and the edges--and I use the arrow keys to move the line up/down because it lets me do it one 'click' at a time--usually two clicks down on the lower and two clicks up on the upper is just about right). However, I'm not sure that will work in this case because in this case darkening the darks will just make (most of) the heron darker, which I think is already sort of the issue here, at least for me. The ideal situation would have been to get around to your right and get more direct light on the bird, but that doesn't look like it would have been possible in the field.

Thanks Dennis and Brian for your suggestions. I appreciate your time to write the comments and will try your suggestions.

Wishing that background line was not wasn't cutting across the face and beak -- perch looks good

I like the side/back lighting and the seaweed covered perch. I agree that ideally the line wouldn't cross through the heron's head but it's still a very nice image.

Allen, I especially like the perch and the light here.

The light is really nice and the perch too, agree adding a little contrast. Nice work.

Ray