This was taken at a local recreation area yesterday. There was nice dappled sunlight as I drove over, which promptly turned to grey overcast upon my arrival. Naturally.
So I shot this and tried to bring a little color out in processing (ART and AP).
IMG_0325.CR3 (28.7 MB)
IMG_0325.CR3.arp (28.3 KB)
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What an excellent photo! No matter what I did to it, it reacted well. Here is what I ended up with.
dt 4.4.2
Cropped this one in a bit to try and emphasize that nice bird as the subject.
I painted out a couple of distractions amongst the reflections on the right and tried to put a bit of colour into the sky as well. Maybe I’ve strong-armed it a bit to much… beautiful capture though!
If you carefully compare my posted version against the raw file, I suspect you’ll find some similar things! Just sayin’… 
Mainly G’MIC tricks including equalize local histogram; kept on the low key since auto-leveling makes the result way too bright for my tastes. 
Oh, just had to… wonderful capture.
All I did after normal processing was to crop a bit so the bird was more noticeable, and just a touch of color saturation:
Now that’s some color, deep south or not!
Thanks for the words. Have to add the colors are there; just need to know how to reveal them. lol
That’s pretty neat how the foliage makes a sort of kaleidoscopic vignette.
Thanks! I was getting frustrated that I wasn’t finding any kind of shot…
Yeah, I have a 70-200 (on a crop sensor) and I actually shot one at 200, but compositionally it didn’t have as much going for it as this less-zoomed version. I decided to make the egret part of the compo, not the main subject. But it’s interesting how others see it.
I like the way the sienna / yellow on the left and the crooked tree on the right kind of make these parenthesis that encapsulate the image. I can’t say I really saw that when I was shooting, but now I do.
It never ceases to amaze me how the story told by a particular capture can change with a simple crop. I can spend minute-after-minute just scooching the crop window around…
Yep, eventually I have to tell myself, “Just crop it already!!!”
I think you had a typo in “hour after hour”. 
Beautiful photo, so I have not made too many changes. Slight increase in contrast. Increase in saturation in the areas where it is high and medium, reduction in low saturation parts to prevent clouds taking on a blue cast. All done in GIMP as always.
