I have a photographer friend who rejects all photo processing.
He's a very good photographer and for him it is a matter of principle that a photo should have ZERO processing done to it. Nothing. No cropping, no brightening. Nothing whatsoever.
If you know me at all, you won't be surprised that I completely reject this idea. I process the hell out of my photos if necessary.
The first thing I will do to almost any bird photo is crop like crazy. The photo above was shot at 600 mm and I still cropped it until the bird more or less fills the frame. I want you to be able to see the bird. After cropping, there was a lot of visible noise so I ran it through a noise reduction filter, and then brightened the shot a little. To me, this is a huge improvement over the straight-out-of-camera photo.
Here's another edited shot. Not much was done to this except for removing a huge blob of bird-poop on the rock behind the crows head. You want to look at bird-poop? Not me. Let's see... anything else? I believe this was also brightened and sharpened a bit. Overall this is still pretty "real", not that I care much about that sort of thing!
The Peacock shot above was cropped and I adjusted the highlights and shadows to achieve the "look" I wanted. There's no need to increase colour saturation on a Peacock, but I'll also do that without hesitation if I feel a photo needs it.
Ok, let's get crazy... the bald eagle photo was cropped a whole bunch and then I replaced the boring white sky behind the bird.
And finally, one more with an enormous crop and a sky replacement. To get this close to the eagle I would have needed a 2,000 mm lens. I'm not sure one exists for my camera, but if it does I probably couldn't lift it and it would cost more than my car! The sky replacement might be too much but would you have known if I didn't tell you?
What about you... will you post-process like this or do you consider it "cheating" like my boring friend does? :-)
All photos are by me, 
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