As I said in my previous post, I saw two squirrels today and got a chance to take some photos. I got really close with my 70-300mm lens and cropped the image above even further. The image was shot at ISO 1250, which means I saw a lot of noise after cropping but I used noise reduction in Lightroom and brought back sharpness with the sharpening tool. I also increased the luminance of the orange colors because the squirrel was pretty dark due to the backlighting (the squirrel was in the middle of the sunlight and the camera). I also decreased the saturation of the green and yellow colors because the leaves in the depht of field area behind the squirrel were too bright and too distracting. I also flipped the image horizontally. Apart from that, I did the usual tonal changes (exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows and so on). I am really like how it looks like after the editing because the RAW image was quite a bit flawed. Do you like the photo above? Here is how it looked like before editing…
Diary of Dennis 
I do like it. It is a nice pose you caught him in and the red squirrel is quite a contrast to the grey ones our American friends normally post photos of.
Yes, I had luck with this shot. I like the pose too 🙂 At least we have one animal here in Germany with a special color 😀 Our birds, for example, are much more boring than elsewhere, not all of them but it seems other places have much more colorful birds.
Oh how lovely! Such a cute photo 🙂
Thank you, I am glad you like it 🙂 Squirrels are cute!
That picture is gold! What a cute shot.
Thanks. I am glad the squirrel was curious and interested to know what I am doing there on the path… that gave me enough time to take the photo. And the pose of the squirrel really shows that “Hey human, what ya doing there?” 🙂
Be good to see a before and after Dennis. Interested to see what the original untreated shot looked like….
Ok 🙂 I added it at the end of the post now. Completely unedited RAW file exported to JPG.
Transformed the picture! Really the colours out. Magic.
That’s what I like so much about shooting RAW format. You can recover tones and colors very well without breaking the image too much.
Quite amazed with the difference