You're welcome. I would say the best thing for the background is to soften it. It's possible to do that without weakening the colours. I avoided desaturating the background for that reason. Vibrance is just a gentler way to desaturate. Using negative clarity softens the background contrast-wise as well as taking the edge off of the detail. Negative sharpening and denoise add to that. The tone sliders and negative contrast can take the edge off of any excessive (i.e. eye-catching) contrast in the background. Watch out for negative contrast weakening the colours too much.

If you're happy with the colouring, go with that. Warm colours advance and cool colours retreat, and since you already have the background selected you could try a slight Temp shift towards blue, which will add depth. My preferred way to deal with an excess of yellow is to use the HSL tool to shift yellow towards orange a little and desaturate if required. Vegetation is usually yellow-green and I often tint-shift green towards green/blue a little (just a nudge) and desaturate. But the best guide is what looks right to your eye.

To my eye the problem is the jay is competing with the sky and a distracting background. Cropping in on the jay increases its presence, which is part of my suggested answer. Making the background less distracting also helps, which I did by selecting it and softening it with negative clarity and negative sharpening and lots of denoise.

The jay is also competing with the brightness of the sky and background. Reducing their highlights takes some of the edge off of that, plus lifting the shadows gives the jay a needed lift brightness-wise. The rest was playing with brightness levels, contrast and colour strength/brightness. I avoided desaturating the background because that would have left the overall image a bit bland. I also avoided cropping in too close because it emphasises the soft patches on the jay's feathers.
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The need for cropping in PP can often be avoided or minimised by the use of the right optics and the right framing. Beyond cropping the benefits of high resolution become more and more unrealistic. 24MP is enough for 6K and currently most displays have lower resolution than that.

Cropping in PP amplifies any noise and softness so there's a limit to how much of that you want to do. There will always be a limit to how free of noise and softness a camera's images can be.

I think your dignified headgear saves your image (but it was close ). Any portrait artist would be satisfied with a result like that.

That would indeed be a good definition of what compression means, but it's not the meaning it's acquired through common usage. In terms of file size, compression simply means to make smaller. Fortunately it's usually stated whether it's lossless or lossy. "Lossy compression" is unambiguous enough to not cause confusion.

Geometrically they're identical. The only difference is in the brightness levels. In the jpeg image the edges of the road appear darker so perhaps that's affecting your perception of the shape of the road.

The only time that helps is when the LEDs are being switched at 60 Hz (50Hz in Europe) when it can cause inconsistency of exposure between shots (but not the small banding that the OP is getting). The banding that you see with an electronic shutter (multiple lines across the image) is caused by a much higher switching frequency and using 60 or 50 Hz doesn't get rid of it.

Mechanical shutters make a noise, electronic shutters are silent. Some cameras give you both options but it's becoming more common for manufacturers to offer only the electronic option.

My guess is that it depends on the compression. Shooting jpg (which is a form of compression) speeds up a camera's burst rate by a) reducing the amount of data and b) reducing the bit depth to 8 bit. Both of those factors reduce the file transfer time by reducing the file size. Other in-camera compression algorithms may or may not be as fast, but more significantly, if they don't involve a drop to 8 bit data it's pretty well guaranteed that the file transfer rate will be significantly slower.

Dropping to 8 bit data is probably the most effective way to reduce file size but 8 bit is the minimum bit depth that you need to cover the needs of human visual perception. That's fine if all you want to do is look at the images, but since 8 bit data is just enough to cover the needs of human visual perception, it doesn't give you much in the way of wiggle room when it comes to pushing and pulling the images in a photo editor.

Compression (making a file smaller) can be lossless or lossy. Jpegging is definitely one of those methods of compression (and it's lossy).

Nice composition. Sometimes selecting, desaturating and a slight WB shift towards yellow works well with blue water.

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Thank you Blurryeyed.

Steve puts in an occasional appearance in this forum.