Welcome to NPN Kori! Stick around and there will be plenty of processing morsels to help you along your way.
You’ve done well in capturing the essence of the place as Hank so eloquently wrote. I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but am familiar enough to know how accurately you’ve rendered the scene; colors, processing, etc. Yes, the light isn’t dramatic, but one can still convey a place well, and you’ve done that.
Also agree with Alan about wishing for a tad more room; actually, all the way around. Since it appears you still had some zooming out room (at 37mm) that there was likely something you tried to exclude from the scene. but in general, here’s my rule or saying around this. If you’re going to include something (mountain top, curved edge of river, or foreground…) then do so with purpose. Same goes for excluding things. If you’re going to drop in to something, like a tall tree, then clip on purpose. Anyway, nothing “wrong” with what you captured - your comp is excellent. Just food for thought about capturing enough space. Quite easy to crop, not so easy to add back.
As far as processing goes, yeah, there’s tons to learn and just as many ways to accomplish the same thing. It’s also very much about personal choice and taste. I think the goal for most is to have a natural rendition. I myself like to push that at time. I hope you don’t mind I downloaded your image and gave it a little contrast and color boost. Easy enough to use Levels/Curves layer, Hue/sat or simple brightness/contrast adjustments in PS or LR.
What I did is described in a post I wrote a while back. It makes use of the LAB color mode. It’s probably overkill for most applications and an advance technique, but the possibilities out there are endless.
I also increased the vertical canvas and “stretched” the sky using the Tranform tool. That’s a great technique when you have blank sky, white snow, or any solid. And at the bottom of the image is a great example where stretching does NOT work, because of how plants and things get distorted. So I resorted to cloning.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if you would rather not have your images altered.
Lon
