My 3 tries, re-edited with colours more "Kevin-taste" (hopefully)

My Try:

Iarga,

Yours is perhaps the best of all, in that it has brought out excellent detail of the bird. What was the secret? Share it with us!

david.

All of you have got very good results on it, it's clear we do our best on photography and practising a lot.
Here I leave two more photos for you all.

So many good things happening in this thread.

I keep wanting to learn the measures taken by others and play a bit myself also, but it moves on so quickly overnight. When I wake up in the morning I am 3 or 4 pages and fiteen images behind the rest of you - the price of living down under

a very free-style manipulation of your image, Issabella
used gradients and gradient-flare



title: "what's there?"

for your second one, a "standard" enhancement (tone-mapping)

Corrected white balance, used levels, contrast, soft light.

I like your tries above,
I did my try on one of them applying new methods learnt in this thread.

My result on the other picture.

Less green, a bit detail and some burning. But because of fewer green, the red roses(?) are also less visable.
The following G'MIC filters most used: "Color grading" and "RGB tone" + some details filters.

David, the result of steven8 is almost the same, but with less noise. So I don't think my try is the best. It's only a different interpretation. I don't have secrets. To make a dark object in a bright sky visable, you can use the retinex filter. The preview of the retinex filter of GIMP is most of the time totaly different than the outcome. So you have to play with it. It is a pitty there is no retinex filter in G'MIC (yet). In Rawtherapee there is a retinex filter, but that filter solely works with RAW.

I made this interpretation only with GIMP and G'MIC. If I don't use only GIMP and G'MIC and use other freeware also, I can get a better result within a minute (in this case!), but I don't want to cheat.

With my beloved G'MIC "Tone enhance" and other tone mapping filters you can also make dark parts of an image more visable. Maybe other people know a filter in G'MIC that is comparable with the retinex filter?

from wikipedia: "...duplicate the background layer, invert the copy and set the blend modes of that top layer to "Soft Light". You can also use an inverted black and white copy of the image as a mask on a brightening layer, such as Curves or Levels."

With this you can (experiment) have a nice result also very quick.

Thank you iarga, nice your explanation about the process. For me everything is important to know.
I like much more your second outcome where there is more saturation.

Thank you also Issabella, I like your "fence"-image more, because your roses are more red. But we both have a purple fringe behind the second column. The purple fringe is already in the original, but now more saturated too.

My reason to be on this forum is also to learn, for I am an amateur in its infancy. The most important thing I learned, is to use the difference between two layers with all kinds of blending modes. If I can subtract something, I can make an addition too. Now I understand that I can sharpen with a blur and saturate with a desaturated image.

White balance, contrast, color balance, mode divide.

Pat, technically the contrast is a bit exaggerated, but in this case the image so manipulated tells us something: "today is a very hot summer day". I like it.

Here leave another two photos for you experts show your abilities and the rest of us to learn.

My tries.

Desaturate, layer mask, focused color.