Poor light- poor image (1 Viewer)

Is there anything that can be done to improve this type of image when the subject is some distance away and the light poor, in this case, behind the Spoonbill, albeit very weak. , Generally yesterday it was dull and overcast. Iso was 800 Ap 5.6 IC-1/3

This is the result of five minutes' tweaking in Photoshop Elements.

Malcolm

Another offering

And another.

Thanks guys, it certainly looked better than the original, I wonder though , would you have had the same camera settings, or would you have said in those circumstances not much that one can do and had it just as a record shot.
Thanhks
Kim

In tricky, high-contrast lighting situations, it can be a good idea to take your exposure reading from a "neutral" area of the scene (eg grass) and either lock that exposure, if your camera has that feature, or else set it manually. It's also worth bracketing exposures. Some cameras allow this feature to be set automatically. If yours doesn't, you would have to take shots at, say, -? and -½ EV then +? and +½. Of course, this presupposes the bird stays around long enough for you to do so!!

With a big white bird like the spoonbill, you have to guard against burning out feather detail in the highlights. In the "improved" examples of your pic, you can see this starting to happen in the versions posted by myself and TheRaptor because we've brightened the whole image. Rob's version has avoided this, but at the cost of remaining slightly underexposed. Which just goes to show how important it is to try and get the exposure right. There is a limit to what can be done afterwards, especially if you don't want your pic to have that "over processed" look.

Malcolm