My primary image consultant, my wife, says "Get rid of the tree" in this image. But I don't know how? I can use the clone tool and try to do it accurately but there ought to be ways to do it that take advantage of the greenness of the tree versus the blackness of the bird.
Sometime using color range to select is useful. However, the PS selection by color range would be problematic for this image because the tree color hue and density varies more than you might imagine and you'll find many pixel matches in the non-tree parts. These could be excluded, for example by the lasso selection tool, but I believe most people would find other methods much easier than color selections.
I will use the color range selector followed by the -lasso to unselect those areas outside of what I wanted.. In this case, the area around it is so uniform, I just used the clone tool. Followed by some levels adjustment and sharpening.
While the tree is a detractor, it also provides some context, as is evidenced by the lack of context once it is removed and the levels adjustment was made.
Yup - the tree should go +1 there. (Clone stamp or Content Aware should do it)
Consider a crop to remove the ledge on the right hand side - I quite like the solid straight wall running at an angle, but the ledge on the right breaks the line.
Whilst you have the Clone stamp tool going, check out the "adjustment brush" and possibly paint over the ledge, increasing contrast a smidge just to help bring the detail out a bit. The bird looks fairly good, hence the reason for the selective approach rather than doing the whole image.
