show me a photo (of a bird) - with a punch of photoshop

Here is the end of this story; final picture.

A cropped close-up version.

And this is how the original picture looked like --

...after I processed the .raw file in Photoshop. Count that as normal editing I do -- in 99% cases, most of the time. This is the middle point, half-way of the story.

And this is original image 'as shot' (the way the camera captured it).

This photo goes for 'Show me your photo (of a bird)' contest, round 11! This week the topic was 'Photo edit'. Check the link for details (in the end of the post) to take part.

Now I invite you to look closer at my creative process / editing routines.

Clickable; the screencap above indicates how I am getting 'normal' enhanced image in Photoshop basing on the .raw file, i.e. all the data that camera have written for this certain click. Most of the times my eyes and camera dont produce the same picture, so I create a picture that looks nice to me. Most often it is an image with more contrast, more details in the darks, and with some purple or cyan tint.

I already published this image on Hive. For the challenge I decided to run an extra editing session with some 'fancy editing' (as I slightly suspect that simple editing/adjusting the picture probably wouldn't be qualified by the jury as "editing").

For the next step I used only one photoshop filter named 'Solarization'.
But it may produce very dramatical changes to the image, hehe.

Filters > Stylization > Solarization

This filter has no certain further adjustments.
This is result I received after applying it.

Dont look too fancy, right? And it is still not looking like that golden shiny birdie... The final step was manual tuning: I used 'Curves' menu to adjust separate R, G, B channels to get the attractive look and nice colour.

Image > Adjustments > Curves [ Ctrl+M ]

Press 'Auto' button, examine the result, and then adjust manually certain channels to get a fancy picture you would be happy with. Cheers!

This photo goes for 'Show me your photo (of a bird)' contest, round 11! This week the topic was 'Photo edit'. Check the rules and details (in the end of the post) to take part, they are pretty standard:

• weekly challenge, new prompt is published on Sunday;
• link back your entry in the comment section of the contest post;
• photo should be your own, obviously;
• post it in #FeatheredFriends community;
• your post may feature more photos, just state which one is your entry (otherwise 1st will be taken into account);
• drop some extra text description;
• mention the contest name in the title of your post.