In Flight....this shot needs help. Anyone?

Unfair question. What don't you like about it? What do you want help with?

Love the overall feel and mood, dark, mysterious, with a sense of grace and beauty.

Try your omni lighting filter. Well worth a day or two of learning.

Getting more depth in both the foreground and background will help a lot, and getting just a bit more light on the bird can bring it out nicely. Took me about 10 minutes to make some subtle but effective changes and the bird pops quite a bit.

Background can be overall darker, leaving some of the more forward trees a little lighter for more of a sense of depth. Think of light (especially very subtle highlights) and shadows creating interest and drama. You're a bit flat here. As always, think like a painter (darker recedes, lighter brings stuff forward). Same with foreground, light is too steady. Allow the light to creep onto the image, darker at the frame's edge (all subtle of course).

Good way to work with omni: Start out with a circle about 3 times the size (or a little more) of the bird. Bring the brightness of the light way way up and the darkness of the surroundings way way too dark. Go very extreme. Then Click ok. Then, under edit, hit fade. A menu will come up, choose darken, and then fade back and forth and see what happens. The bird won't get lighter but you can control the background light quite nicely. Don't do it enough to show a halo, but you can still get good effects. You can also do that with some of the trees to get them to stand out.

After you work at it for a while, post what you get and we can discuss. This lighting tool, when used with finesse is a very powerful post-processing tool . . . one of the best.

By the way, you're saving your images at an odd size for posting, so your viewers aren't seeing the best quality for monitor viewing. Should save at 72 dpi and you can cut your actual inch dimensions in half. You've got it saved at about 22" x 18" at 31 dpi. Since screens are calibrated for 72 dpi, you're not making the most of even a small jpg. Will appear the same size if you halve it to about 10 x 9 and increase from 31 to 72 dpi.

Also, something's weird about your profile usage. When I open your jpg in Photoshop, telling photoshop to preserve your embedded profile, it looks a lot better than it does on PN. Have you compared how yours looks in photoshop with how it looks on PN. There's much more variety of tone and depth, more subtle shading when viewed in photoshop. When I save for PN, the last step I take is to strip out the camera's profile and convert the color to the working space. This is usually more compatible with PN and when I do this, my PN version looks very similar to how it looks in photoshop.