Before & After: Great Blue Heron Pair

1/400 | f/9 | ISO 200 | 700 mm

Read on to see the before and the processing to get to the after ...

This image was pretty good straight out of camera, so only minor adjustments were made:

• In Camera Raw (Lightroom): in the Tone Curve dialog box, I added a medium contrast point curve. This boosted the saturation a bit.  
• In photoshop, added canvas to the top, left, and right of the frame. I then filled it in with content aware. Take a look at my recent tutorial to see how to add canvas to an image.
• Used the patch tool to remove some of the leaves from the bottom right of the image.
• Cropped and resized for web (1200 px tall, 72 dpi)
• Sharpened for web (tutorial coming soon!)

That's it!