Shot this Parrot a couple of months ago in my friends garden in cologne.
Fun Fact: They broke out of the cologne zoo a few years ago and populated in a nearby park.
DSC02938.ARW (23.8 MB)
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (29.7 KB)
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Mirrored, cropped a huge lot, exposure shift, denoised, added a lot of contrast, Lutified colours, plenty of sharpening…
My “result” :
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Parakeets are hard, their plumage seems very fine and they hardly have any contrast in their bodies, it’s just a blob of color.
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (22.7 KB)
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I realise now that I used tone equaliser to darken the sky, but then I cropped the whole sky out and left TE on
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (20.1 KB)
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DT 5.6
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A parrot in cologne isn’t necessarily the most common thing. So depending on what story the picture shall tell, I would show where the parrot is sitting. For that reason I left in a good part of the roof.
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (18,2 KB)
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DSC02938.ARW.xmp (21,5 KB)
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@Knusperkeks For wildlife photo editing, according to both courses that I attended, it’s considered an error to crop the photo in a way that doesn’t give the main subject enough space in front of it or leaves more space behind than in front.
So far, my preferred crop would be the top square portion of @Attila_Low’s edit.
Thanks for the tip! You mainly care about space in front/behind the subject and not so much about left/right margins?
I disliked the upright branch left of the parrot and was in the mood for an experiment (without any further thought or knowledge), I guess 
. Looking at all the other submissions, I am not that convinced by my choice either. @Popanz also has a point about the roof’s importance for the story. However a big bird and a calm/hidden roof is what I like as well. Should blame the tree and the parrot! 
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My version. I had to crop the image quite a bit to get it to look like this.
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (15.4 KB)
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A reserved edit:
software: darktable
base: AgX DFS with daylight white balance (5600k in white balance module)
additives: details rolloff in highlights (contrast equalizer), bloom with diffuse or sharpen module, grain (400iso and bring the strength down a little)
selective edits: used contrast equalizer to boost the detail on the bird, and some simple shape masks to add vignette and reduce on the edges of the image.
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (25.9 KB)
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In my edit I used CB-RGB to handle the greens and the red roof separately. I split-toned the greens more blue in the shadows and more yellow in the highlights. I also gave the light more direction using the exposure module. Then I used the contrast equalizer with an AI mask on the parrot to enhance the details there.
DSC02938_01.ARW.xmp (17.5 KB)
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The rose ringed parakeet is at this point pretty much native to a number of European cities. Some have their own legends of where they escaped from - in London the story goes that a pair escaped from the movie set of The African Queen in the 50s (even though there are no parakeets in the movie). In Rome and Istanbul I think the most common idea is they are descendants of pets escaped from apartments.
DSC02938.ARW.xmp (63.4 KB)
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