Its interesting that "sky replacement" is a NO No for some but things like "Dehaze", "Focus Stacking" and "HDR" don't rise to the same level of controversy.

Sometimes you need to augment what your camera to do. Sometimes you need to augment to replicate what your memories are of a situation. The attached photos are from the 1st hour of my first game drive in Africa. The camera was a Canon 60d.
The finished photo is a composite of the first 2 out of camera photos. These 2 photos were taken about 3 minuets and 1/4 mile apart both shooting W/NW looking into the setting sun. Sky replacement done the hard way using layer techniques circa 2012. Then some dodging and burning to increase the contrast between the leopard and the tree trunk. Plus some color enhancements.
Fake? Well I didn't know how to get the leopard and the sky to both be in proper exposure in a single shot.
I like the end product and my guests think its pretty good. What else matters?

What constitutes the "original" photograph?
As photographers worldwide we often revere the work of past artists like Ansel Adams and Galen Rowel.
In relation to the question at hand regarding sky replacement or other substantive additions or subtractions in a photo its useful to look at the original out of camera prints of some of the famous photos by these artists versus the images that we have viewed as their most famous work .
For example some of Ansel Adams out of camera prints our, quite frankly, washed out blah undecipherable nothings. After considerable dodging and burning in the darkroom what has emerged are works of art.
Just because we now do digitally on a computer rather in a darkroom the oft repetitive tasks of enhancing images that our cameras still fail to reproduce doesn't make the result any more or less a work of the imagination and creativity of the person who works both behind the lens and on the keyboard or a darkroom.

One of the greatest differences to my editing is when I bought a laptop equipped with a hi res - speak 4k display. Hi res displays are also often better color calibrated. Also go for 32 meg of RAM if you going to look for best speed.
Go to Adobe and search for their recommendations on best configs

macie
Curious when did you order and from which vendor.
Thanks
Stan

Anybody out there have any G2 as to when, if Canon will begin shipping the R5 again? I placed my order 2 1/2 months ago with B&H and, so far, despite several unkept commitments from the B&H people they seem to not have any firm or even rumor of an idea as to when they will get product from Canon.

First if your not shooting in RAW mode you're wasting the capabilities of your camera.
Second shoot in a spot metering mode and be sure from your in camera histogram you're not clipping the dark end of the exposure.
Then you can always bring back the underside of the wings in post processing.

From a lot of experience practicing with photographing pelicans at the beach, 1/1500 is generally good to stop wing motion for hand held shots of big birds up to 500 - 600 mm if your lens or camera has good image stabilization.
I generally try to fix shutter speed and fixed on a tighter aperture to get better depth of field and let AUTO ISO take care of the exposure. Shoot in burst mode for several seconds to get the one GOOD shot.

Worst case shooting situation I have found is when the sky is significantly brighter than the light on the subject -under-wings - so it helps to have a darker sky - evenings with your back to the sun. But birds have the uncanny habit of not willingly posing for you. And, even with spot metering the image you're working with in camera is generally smaller than the spot metering region.

Sorry to have created an **** storm but for all of you negates out their you missed the point (or didn't listen to the fact) .........But I've been waiting for almost a month for them to give me a date by which they can give me a date by which they might ship. ....... This is the source of irritation ---nobody can say if I'm first of the list 10th or 10 thousandth. Nobody can say when B&H expects their next order. Nobody can say how many units will be allocated in that order. If I order a 1000 tons of steel to build a building or 10,000 CPUs to build a server farm I don't expect them to be delivered the next day. I do expect an expected delivery date forecast and updates if there are changes to that forecast. It is a hallmark of good business management and good customer relations.

The ad in UHH for the R5 is disingenuous. I ordered on 7/25. They sent me the lens adapter immediately. But I've been waiting for almost a month for them to give me a date by which they can give me a date by which they might ship. In other words I don't know if its better to keep hoping in vain for some professionalism to breakout at B&H or go to another vendor and get in the back of that vendor's line.
B&H has been among the best of the NY Camera stores in the past but for the last year or more things seem to be breaking down.

Check out the BEN Q product line. I had one Good color calibration and matching and very sharp images.

I thought the same until after my cataract surgery.

I have a BenQ 4k monitor. Several years now. Its really good for photo-editing in Lightroom and Luminar

This depends on what type and how much photo shooting you're doing. I have about 3 T of photo files now dating back almost 20 years. But 3/4 of that is just over the past 3 years since i got a 5 D IV and now that I moving on to an R5 the rate of growth will probably go up.

I recently had a crash on my internal 3T drive and the computer geek recommended replacing it with a 1T ssd for the OS and other programs and an external HDD for photo files. I went for an 8T external HDD.
With the SSD handling the OS the computer is responding notably faster. I also use a continuous cloud back up of both drives. Backblaze works well for me.

I've used my Canon 100-400 II lens for several years now. For safari I'd say used in conjunction with a 1.4x teleconverter on my 5d IV the combo is unbeatable. It is small and light enough to be usable in the safari vehicles yet has the reach for the many distance shots you'll be taking. A bigger prime lens would be too bulky. Even with the lowest f of 5.6 for the combo it works well since most of your shots will be in full daylight. I'm pretty successful with hand held using this combo particularly if I stay above 1/1500 which you'll want anyway to stop the faster moving animals. Note you probably won't use a tripod much on safari as its too clumsy to be trying move it around in the jeeps and often the action is moving pretty quickly plus other people are moving around in the vehicle so you don't really have a stable platform anyway.
All this said, I'm looking forward to trying the lens combo with one of the newer mirrorless models due out soon - one of which purportedly will be similar in function to the 5d IV.

I totally agree. I have all of my photos in a Windows 10 system under the PICTURES library with each file designated by a yyyy_mm_dd file name (yyyy goes from 1998 to 2020 now). This works best for me in finding particular photo shoots. I can go back later and append a descriptive name to the end of the date in order to find particular shoots or I can also create a master folder for say a multi day effort and put the daily folders below or ad in separate sub folders for jpegs for sharing after I have edited the RAW files.
I generally go straight from these files into LR Import though if I have perhaps a lot of junk (inside if the lens cap, setup photos, etc) I may do some pre -import cleanup using Digital Photo Professional before spending the extra time waiting for the LR Import when you may have many hundreds of files to move.