Laughter in the air

Yesterday when walking with my dogs, one of them pounced on a baby lorikeet that had crash landed on the ground. (I rescued it and took it to a wildlife hospital where it is doing well - no injuries!) So I should not have been surprised when, on hearing the tell-tale sound of a Kookaburra throatily telling the other birds to leave him alone from his perch on a tree root that my faithful black retriever dashed to my rescue in the frantic hope that this time he would be allowed to keep his catch. However I had staggered out there with tripod, camera and long lens so was not exactly pleased with his helpfulness!
The Kookaburra was not an injured bird so it was able to fly up into a branch of the fire-wheel tree - Samson was hot on his heels so before I could even call the dog to leave it alone, the bird had flown! Kookaburras are actually a bird that will allow you to get quite close to them, usually. I followed my feathered quarry into a fenced area - being sure to close the gate with Samson on the other side! Unfortunately  now the bird was quite sure that I wanted to catch it and only very briefly did it sit in range of the camera. Luckily for me that one photograph turned out quite reasonable - except that it was a tad dark.

With the darkness corrected.
Since many people do take photographs with the main subject either silhouetted or a bit darker than liked, I will show you what I did to end up with this picture so that you too can fool everyone into thinking you take wonderful shots every time!
To begin with I used the quick selection tool in Photoshop Elements and dragged it over the branch and the bird.

You can see from the red arrows how I dragged the tool down and across the bird and the branch, Some of the background was selected too but I then held down the ALT key and with the same tool slowly and carefully dragged over those areas to de-select them.
Now I needed to brighten the bird and branch (You can now see that they do look a bit dull and need a "lift")
I then opened Levels (Ctrl + L) and moved the mid tones and the highlights sliders. The mid tones (centre slider) was moved the most.

The bird's eye looks way too dark so I zoomed in and I could see that there were catch lights there but quite faint. I took the Dodge tool and gave one smooth brush stroke over the lighter part of the eye just to brighten it a little. I didn't want to over do it or it would have looked as if the picture had been taken with a flash.
There was one more thing to do before I flattened the image and that was to add a little sharpening. I usually use Smart Sharpen and these are the settings that worked for this image (each image needs a different amount).

You can tell by the enlarged image in the sharpen window that the Kookaburra is still on a separate layer, this is why there is that grey mesh all around the bird. The background image does not show up in the sharpen window. From the closer shot you can see the bright bit in the eye that I had made a little brighter.
The image was then flattened and my hand written signature put on the bottom - and a simple "Stroke" that makes a bit of a border. Then it was saved with a new name.
I always keep my original photographs in a folder that is saved not only to my computer but also to an external hard drive. The originals are like my "negatives" I will be able to return to them in years to come and with my newly acquired skills make and even better job of readying them for printing. I do keep the corrected ones on the external drive too - but separate from the originals.
AJ