It's really amazing what a little bit of post-processing can do with pictures, especially when you are shooting in raw. These are the before and after shots of the blue heron I shot last night.

All were shot hand-held on a Canon T5i with a Tokina AT-X 400AF 400mm using manual focus.

Nothing major in the post-processing but huge differences.

I cropped just a bit to improve the framing since I was shooting a moving animal and didn't always have the time to do it in the camera even if it was moving slowly.

In Lightroom, on most, I increased the clarity to +26, vibrance and saturation to +17, contrast to +2, and exposure to +0.24. The other one was fairly close to that.

In Photoshop, I duplicated the background layer and converted the new layer to a smart object, and used a high pass filter with a radius in the 3 - 5 range. Then I set that layer's blending mode to either a soft light or hard light depending on what I thought looked better. Helps with bringing out the detail quite a bit.

And that's it but the differences are amazing.