First time poster with Red-Winged Blackbird

I went to Occoquan Wildlife Refuge yesterday looking to get some good Heron shots. After following eBird reports for the Refuge for a while I decided it was time for me to go.
Unfortunately I didn't get any Herons closeups. They usually just flew away from me, or were too far to begin with.

I did however observe Red-Winged Blackbirds for a while, and here is what I feel the better shot out of the bunch.
Being a post processing novice, I'd appreciate your feedback.
I just did some basic whites & blacks and Highlight/Shadow adjustments.
The picture is shot with a 7D2 and Sigma 15-600 C @600mm f/6.3 1/1600 ISO640 taken at 8:30AM.

At the end of the day, my trip was still a success, as I don't usually see many Red-Winged Blackbirds around my house.
Hopefully I'll have more luck with the herons next time out

Hi Martin, welcome to the forum. A few suggestions would be to crop in a bit tighter if you have the image quality.
It looks like the bird could use a bit more sharpening also. Enclose is a crop and in blue you will notice where your blacks are
completely solid and need to be adjusted. Looking forward to seeing more.

-Tim

Tim, thanks for the suggestions. I brightened the shadows some more, but some areas seem really light now.
Also cropped some more like you said and locally sharpened the bird some more and turned the Noise slider all the way down. But the breast feather look strange to me now. Any suggestions on how to fix that?

Martin you can selectively lighten areas in PS while you are in raw.
Hope this helps.

-Tim

Martin...one of the things I do almost all of the time when it comes to
post processing is put my bird on its own layer. This way whatever you
do to the bird, won't affect the background and vice versa.

When it comes to Red-winged Blackbirds, I generally start with at least
+1 exposure to get the blacks right in camera. The downside is the color
part of the wings will be slightly overblown, but it'll be a lot easier recovering
that small amount vs trying to increase the exposure of the blacks, which
depending on the underexposure, will start to bring in noise.

Doug

Thanks for the tips, guys.
I'm currently only using Lightroom, but it sound like I need to check into Photoshop some more, or see how far I can get with other software.
I use Pixelmator for some tasks that I can't do in Lightroom.

Hello, Martin. Welcome to the forum.

What Doug West wrote. My first thought was by overexposing a stop, you would have an easier time with the blacks. Also what Tim wrote about selective sharpening. I don't know of any step I've incorporated that has done so much to move my processing forward. Good luck with your herons.

Hi Martin ,Welcome love your Photo a little different don't see to many in sycamore trees usually cattails. Keep practicing. Lots of good advice on here.