When it’s overcast, just go with it. I tried a B&W version but I kinda like the little splash of green at the bottom, as well as the small bits of color on the birds.
ART 1.22.1
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Nice capture, and yes, the colour is a nice visual treat. I’m away from home so cannot play myself, but thought I’d explore the caption - are these herons? I’d have called them pied cormorants. It’s possible that different naming conventions in different countries come in to play - I know that the black cormorant (Australia) is called a shag (New Zealand). But I thought herons were entirely different class of bird. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron I can find no cormorant-type birds.
I mostly sacrificed the greens for the amazing shades of gray in the sky. dt 4.8.1
Almost certainly correct… My brain initially said “heron” since they’re also at this location and then I never bothered to confirm. But they don’t look especially “hero(n)ic”, do they?
So I guess the caption should be, “It’s a pied cormorant or two!”
Update, kinda… There are apparently two types of cormorants in Louisiana. the Double-crested Cormorant and the Neotropic Cormorant. There’s also a very similar bird, the Anhinga. To me, my photo doesn’t look exactly like any of them based on what I can find online. However, there are variations with most birds and it looks closest to the Double-crested cormorant. However, I’ll resist the urge to yet again rename the thread… 
Yeah, it was pretty severely underexposed. I meant to manage the highlights, but ended up micro-managing them. 
For me I wanted to challenge my masking skills to bring the birds out of the shadow.
IMG_5869.CR3.xmp (15.7 KB)
IMG_5869.CR3.xmp (15.0 KB)
I see very strong halo both in @Terry’s and @priort’s version. I’m looking on the phone, though, and small images often expose halos more.
Edit: checked on the computer, and see the halos there, too (bright outlines in the sky around the tree).
For me it looks like a snakebird (Anhinga anhinga).
Two versions of the same edit, a darker one and a brighter one…
I also have some halos around the edges. Rescaling graciously makes them almost invisible
I don’t really see them. What I’ve found is that I often see them more if the image is scaled down (zoomed out). For example, I edit in the darkroom, I think it’s OK, then return to the lighttable, and see it there. The same applies to vignetting and other artificial, gradual lightness changes.
So I tried a different approach at masking. @kofa I am always open to constructive criticism.
I don’t see a halo on this one. Also, I think I’m somehow more sensitive to halos than most.
The difference in the second one is I set initial exposure to the shadows and then used a parametric mask to select the sky in a second instance of exposure to darken the sky. This produced less halos than my first attempt where I set the initial exposure for the sky, then doing a parametric mask on the sky and inverting the parametric mask to brighten the shadows in a second instance of exposure. Feather is challenging on an inverted parametric mask. I continue to learn through practice.
In Selective Editing / Color & Light I did set the Blur shape detection to the minimum value of 2 which helps a lot.
I think I’m a bit allergic to halos as well
Yes, I saw it also when pixel-peeping, but it’s more like a sharpening / local contrast artefact. Whatever it is, it only matters if one sees it, and without pixel-peeping, it’s not a concern (to my eyes).
Looks like an illustration in a book; it has some watercolour/aquarelle feel to it. I like it a lot!
I agree, this doesn’t look like a photo anymore, BUT it looks great!
Well done @Thomas_Do
