red tailed hawk - please C & C

Hi Smallick, when you used the levels tool to select white point the feathers that you clicked on were probably supposed to be slightly less that white so the net result is that anything brighter than that becomes blown out white. Experiment by clicking on different points that you think should be white and notice the difference in the end result.

Sounds good. I shall try experimenting with the pics. thanks

Does Gimp have sliders? Sliders are often simpler to use than tone curves.

In LR5, there are 2 sliders that have the most direct control over brigtness of highlights - named Highlights and Whites. Highlights reduces the exposure (darkens) the brightest part of the image (shifts the righthand edge of the histogram towards the left (a simplification)), and the Whites adjusts the overall white point (sounds a bit similar result to what sidknee is describing). Playing with those 2 sliders goes a long way towards correcting blown out whites.

In some images (not yours), where the whites are blown in the raw file, you won't be able to bring any detail back from the blown highlights. As you are bringin you highlights up from the original capture, you should be able to get some nice detail in those white feathers.

There are sliders to adjust the brightness and contrast. And there are sliders to adjust the levels. I played around a bit with it. Here are the results - the second one went through USM. I went back to the looser crop. Let me know what you think. Again, thanks for the feedback.

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Lucky shot, awesome!
This tutorial on Luminosty Masks for Gimp should help you achieve a very attractive look for your image. Enjoy, and have fun!

Crop looks good again, however on my (uncalibrated) monitor it looks like it could still need some more exposure. I'm not too familiar with GIMP, but if I were trying to edit this in Lightroom I'd go straight for the exposure (+), shadows (+) and highlights (-).

Oh ya, I forgot to mention, try out RawTherapee, it's a free raw converter that puts DPP to shame IMHO.
It's not for the 'faint of heart' though, it has a massive amount of controls and takes some getting
used to like everything else. It works for Mac and Windows and outputs to .jpg, .tiff, and .png files.

Checkout the screenshots here.

Supported Camera List is here.

RawTherapee download page is here.

On the download page just use the dropdown menus to select your operating system, bit depth,
and then 'stable release' to get a latest stable release for your system.
Have fun!

Thank you so much, Douglas and Brandon.

RawTherapee looks awesome, although you can tell PPing is not my forte. I shall try it tonight, though.

One more attempt. This one with RawTherapee. It was actually easier for me to use this compared to Gimp.

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Looking good smallick!

Thanks, Brandon. This is the first time I have actually worked on PPing. I think I'm getting the hang of it.