Baby House Wren

Last Summer was good for baby birds with quite a few species breeding successfully on our property. I found a batch of fledgeling wrens foraging around some stick piles near our house.  This one was backlit with early morning sun and the overall raw image was a nightmare with grain and blotches of bright and dark patches that made the wren disappear from view.  I cropped for composition and reduced the very bright patches with the Light1 luminosity mask. I also bumped up the brightness in the dark1 luminosity mask as well. I reduced the impact of the left side with an adjustment layer with a reduction in exposure by 1 stop.  I applied Topaz Detail 3.2 to bring up detail in the feathers.  Finally,  I applied Dfine2 to reduce noise in the light areas and a 9 pixel Guassian blur adjustment layer to eliminate some of the artifacts produced through sharpening on the left side.   A lot of work for one baby wren caught in difficult lighting. K5 IIs 600mm f5.6 (1/640sec at f5.6, ISO 800).....................Jim