I took this photo in crappy light (moan moan moan) yesterday afternoon. The original image is below, and was taken in landscape format. Normal sharpening applied, but no exposure compensation - this is the light as it was.

Despite the light, I felt it was still quite a nice photo, but what about those stupid branches? Here is my next attempt - some cropping to portrait format, and removal of the two branches that were poking out either side. Again normal sharpening, but no change in exposure.

An improvement, though I need to spend more time on the background. Some brightness might help (about +0.8), but the branches behind the bird are still a little distracting. Wouldn't it be nice to have it on a single stem? This latter one is pushing it, but might be possible. My general rule of thumb is that I will make changes only if I can be bothered, and only if the time spent is brief. This means I very rarely make any changes, and instead attempt to get the clean shot I am after whilst in the field by changing angles and so on. This isn't always possible of course, and often I'm just thankful to be able to get the bird in the frame at all! So I admit to thinking "digitally" at times, by doing things like making sure two twigs don't cross, knowing that it's then easier to get rid of just one of them in post-processing. There is the old argument about completely falsifying wildlife photography by use of digital techniques, but I'm in the camp that says a bit of tidying up isn't problematic, and that by erasing a twig here, or a blotch there, that isn't attempting to create a scene that didn't exist in nature. A step too far, in my opinion, would be erasing a Hummingbird feeder and putting a nice flower in its place - that's not what was there, it's made up. 

So how about this? I've done more than I would normally do on this one; the idea came to me that these extra steps might be useful for illustrating this post about digital manipulation. So very carefully I've gone around with the clone stamp tool (where you can copy one lot of pixels on top of another lot) and got rid of the thick branch to the left of the main stem which went behind the bird somewhere. Using the same tool, I've also got rid of the thinnest twig that intruded into the undertail, and attempted to recreate the plumage detail - all relatively straightforward so far. Then we come to the branches below the bird - how can that be done? To be honest I really struggled with this bit, and I think that it's easily apparent that all is not quite as it seems. But that's only because I know what was there before - would you have spotted it had I only posted this one image? After all, the bird is the subject, and that's what draws people's eyes, not a few centimetres of twig at the bottom of the frame, and photoshoppers can use this to their advantage. Always stay away from the bird's head and eyes, as that's where people look! So what do you think? Please use the comments box to share your opinions. For what it's worth, I actually like both images....