Fixing dark image (1 Viewer)

I've attached a cropped (and resized) image straight out of my Canon 10D. I've tried various ways to bring out the bird's details (Common Yellowthroat) but I'm really lost on how to get a good end product. The bird was sitting (briefly) in heavy shade.

Using Photo Elements 2.0 and Paint Shop Pro 8.10 as my main image processors but my results are very poor. I really would like some step by step expert help.

Chris, I think you omitted the attachment.

Pushed wrong key. Image there now. Sorry.

The underside is very under-exposed.

Using the middle slider in Levels in Photoshop has 'opened out' the colours but has left a very 'flat' image, but boosting the contrast darkens it again so I've used the Burn tool to darken the top of the bird and the 'Dodge' tool to lighten the underside. Also boosted the yellow in 'Selective colour'

When it's very under-exposed using the levels does lighten it a lot but it leaves a less than smooth pattern in areas of plain colour so I've reduced the graininess a little although this takes the sharpness down a bit

I'm interested to see what others can do with this image with more time to work at it.

Adey

If you haven't got 'Selective Colour' in Elements then choose the 'yellow' in 'Hue/saturation' (Enhance>Color>Hue/Saturation) and move the 'saturation' slider over to the right

The retouching forum at dpreview seems a good place to get help on saving those precious pics that have gone awry :
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1006

With this image might well be worth using a contrast mask :
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/contrast_masking.shtml
before tuning levels or curves. And/or could use specialist filter such as Applied Science Fiction's Digital SHO filter :
http://www.asf.com/products/plugins/sho/pluginSHO.asp