This is a male Australian Purple-crowned Pigeon ( Ptilinopus superbus ). It is also known as the Purple-crowned Fruit Dove. I have never seen one of these in the wild because I live too far south - I photographed it at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. It was so tame - just sitting there posing on the branch, and allowed me to get quite close (this was taken at 62mm).
Editing steps:
Raw conversion (just changed WB slightly)
Crop
Curves adjustment
Brightness/contrast
Dodge
Hue/saturation to increase saturation slightly
Resize to 1024 on longest edge
Noise Ninja (trial version limited to 1024x1024)
USM masked to bird and foreground branch only
Stronger USM applied only to the head
Vignette
Applied border
SFW
I hope this does well enough for me to hold my place in the 2009 FSM. An improvement would be nice though :)
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