red tailed hawk - please C & C

Caught sight of this beautiful bird while walking down the street. It was resting on a banister about 2 meters from me, happily posing for the camera.

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What a great shot! Would love to see the edit on this to brighten up the picture & put the focal point on those eyes.

Nice shot and good timing!!! I agree with Jessi, it appears a bit underexposed.

Thanks a lot. Can I use gimp to do what you suggested?

You can get a free trail of Lightroom/Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/d​ownloads.html). I do not work in Gimp so I am not sure what you can do on there. I know DPP that comes free with Canon cameras would work too.

I am slightly conversant with DPP, so let me give that a shot. Thanks for the feedback. Will repost the PPed photo soon.

Smallick, you absolutely could do it with Gimp. I am not at my processing machine, so I can't give you the specific detail, but look for the option that lets you adjust brightness/contrast. I would definitely create a new layer and adjust and then mask out the bird to only the hawk itself is effected.
I love that he had a little post meal red stuff on him. If you would have been able to get him/her actually looking at you, it would be a PERFECT shot.

Nice shot, I never seem to be able to get that close. Brightening it up is an easy thing to do using gimp. Use the levels tool set the white point on some of the white feathers on the birds chest, a very slight 's' curve using the curves tool and a very slight USM.
I took the liberty of trying out the above directions, if you don't want your work reposted just say so and I'll take it down again. I'm sure that with the original file, RAW hopefuly, and a little more time a very nice image could be achieved.

Hello sidknee. Wow, this is impressive. I have never really post-processed an image before. I do have this image in RAW, but could not open that in gimp. I had to first convert it to jpeg. What do mean by "very slight USM"? How long did it take for you to enhance the pic? thanks

Hi sidknee, followed your directions (found about USM on another thread). Here is the result. Thanks a lot for the pointers.

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Hi Smallick, that's much better
If you want to open your RAW files straight into gimp you'll need to install the ufraw plugin although that is a little tricky on windows, probably easier to use DPP. If you save your images from DPP as uncompressed tiff rather than jpeg you'll have more info to work with in your PP program of choice. Getting into the habit of saving in your PP programs native file format is also a good thing as every time you save as jpeg it degrades the image due to the compression.

Thanks a lot, sidknee. Will adopt that workflow in the future.

I've come in late, but 2 comments on your edit:

1. I prefer your first, looser, crop. The latter one is very tight on the bird.

2. I think that you should pull down the highlights, as the whites on the feathers look blown (at least, on my monitor).

Nice bird!

Sorry, newbie question. How do I pull down the highlights? thanks for the feedback.

Don't be sorry, these people are great at helping out. I have learned a ton from them!

I agree on the dodgyexposure comments on the crop too.