Hi Tom, in this workshop I was primarily trying to lighten the bird up a bit to display some more detail. To do this I applied an overlay layer (with 50% grey) and painted the bird repeatedly with a 5% opacity soft brush (kind of like dodging). I hope this meets with your approval. I have removed the copy from my terminal.
apparently the original has some digital oversharpenign artifacts that aren't obvious on my monitor. i went back to the RAW file and reprocessed the shot with less sharpening. to be honest i had to squint at a low resolution monitor at work to see the effect but for those folks who get concerned over that here's a better version