My first Play Raw.
I used the new contrast & texture module by @jandren. You may want to install one of the latest nightly builds of dt to check this.
I shoot mostly birds. This one I got in the south of France.
2D8A6366.CR3 (37.4 MB)
2D8A6366.CR3.xmp (11.5 KB)
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
No background masking, just tone curve. Bit of clipping with highpass just to get the brightest feathers standing out more
My take:
Mirrored and cropped. Picture was overexposed, took it down with gamma correction, a bit of contrast and sharpen, that’s all…
2D8A6366.CR3.xmp (26.1 KB)
Tried Ansel on it the traditional way, failed.
In my opinion, this is not a keeper under the traditional processing due to the insufficient tonal separation of the subject from the background, especially at the top. At the bottom, the clear background definitely helps. @Christian_Pfister Do you have a photo of the same subject placed differently against the background?
An attempt to rescue this with masking creates a “pasted bird” effect, so I limited this to less than 0.3 EV. Like others in this thread, I tried to compensate for this by sharpening the bird and blurring/darkening the distant background, yet this doesn’t save the image either.
To collect the likes separately per edit, I will post the “infrared” look separately.
And here is the promised “infrared” look, also edited in Ansel.
Achieved through a BW conversion with a negative coefficient in the blue channel.
And another variation of this, with grass patches deliberately blown out for contrast.
I prefer the first one, lets the bird stand out nicely. The second one is too harsh for my taste and the blotchy overexposed grass is distracting.
I’ll still keep the shot for the attitude of the bird and its enormous feet/claws.
It’s quite rare to see them coming out into open space. They are very shy and their natural habitat is inside or at the border of the reed where they have good camouflage. But it was overcast at noon, so flat light.
If you want to try, I’ve many other shots of purple herons where they separate better against the background:
Very nice moment, tried two crops…
killer machine… 
The two morephoto’s you shared are beautiful as well, especially the last one!
I would keep it because in my eyes it’s a nice shot. But maybe I’m a bad photographer. Or have low expectations on a photo. Or both. 
My attempt to save this shot from the bin 
:
I like the first crop but there are not that many pixels left 
. Although I had a 500mm tele I couldn’t get closer.
I have tried to crop a bit and put focus on this beautiful bird without exaggerating. Perhaps i have darkened the vignette too much potentially this bird pops to much but this is my first approach.
No idea what this bird looks like irl, but I wasnt loving the sunburn effect my first pass was creating. Anyway, I was trying for a slightly soft and glowing render but that doesnt really come through at small sizes without cranking things to 11.
Your image is quite close to reality. You can find them in Eurasia and Africa but not in the Americas. In my opinion the most beautiful heron in Europe, colorwise.
