Nice pose and excellent detail, Dave. I probably would have gone with a slightly more subdued background at least in places. I find the one bright leaf behind the finch’s rump particularly pulls my eye. There are also a couple of almost in focus leaf tips just sticking into the right side of the frame that I’d probably remove. Burning often turns the brighter highlights an ugly gray, so these days I usually pick up a little color from the less bright foliage and using a low transparency brush, just brush it over the offending areas until they’re mellowed out. @Diane_Miller likes to use 50% opacity cloning and that works admirably as well.
Dave, you got a great pose here, and the colour and detail are excellent. The busy, mottled BG competes a bit with the bird, so I’d tone it down a lot. The bright blob around the beak is distracting; careful burning would take care of that. I usually pay special attention to the areas around a subject, to assure they are not distracting.
A very fine catch here!
Nice job on the repost, Dave. If you’d like, it’s easier to compare the original with the repost if you put the repost in the original post. Just go to the bottom of the post (before any comments) and click on the pencil icon. That puts you in the edit mode and you can put your cursor before or after the character string that represents the original image and use the upload arrow in the toolbar at the top of the edit screen to upload the revised image. Since you’ll be in the edit mode, you can enter text to identify which image is the original and which the revised and put a note in the title that you’ve posted a revised image. Once you’ve done it once , it’s a breeze.
