Small stream in Upstate Vermont. Didn’t quite time it right for prime color, but did find a few trees already changing. It looks a lot sharper on my monitor than in the upload.
Is this a composite: No
1/30 @ F14, ISO 640, 18-270 @ 20
What a really nice spot on this brook. I enjoy seeing the stream curving through the scene.
I found the image had maybe too many elements to seem well composed. In the attachment, I focused on making the red tree the main element and the other elements supporting players.
I decreased green/yellow saturation, darkened the big bright foreground rock, cropped a bit, tried to bring out some of the detail in the sky, pushed colors a little, and cloned out a small branch in top edge center.
Overall, I wish I were on that stream, and would love to find a pool of brook trout.
Thank you for the re-work and critique. The new version looks much improved. I appreciate the description of your process. It will help me in the future.
I actually like that you caught the foliage early, there is nice color contrast between the red maple and the green of the other trees. And since red maples turn earlier, by the time the rest of these trees were peak color, the red maple would have dropped its leaves. And this image looks plenty sharp to my eye, any more and it would border on being over-sharpened.
Just to show that photography is totally subjective, I prefer the original post over the rework from @Dick_Knudson. I can understand why Dick might suggest de-saturating green/yellow, he is trying to emphasize the red maple. But for my subjective taste, I think the red is such a bold and dominant color, that there is little risk of saturated/green yellow competing too much with the red. I prefer the more vibrant look of the green/yellow in your original post.
Thank you Ed. The original version shows what I saw when I took the shot. The large rock in the foreground gave a light balance to the rest of the scene and the sunlight was lighting the yellows and greens. I took this at 9am and used very little saturation in pp.
I have lived in New England my entire life (VT, NH, MA), and after decades of photographing autumn in New England, I never tire of it. Many people who have never actually seen autumn in New England can’t believe how vibrant and saturated the colors are in real life (especially if the leaves are wet). The colors in your original post look very natural and realistic to me. It looks like this scene may have been from October 2020, the bad drought really lowered water levels dramatically last fall. The rocks here really show how dry it got.
Shot October '16. My wife was taking classes at King Arthur Flour and I was wandering with my camera. We were living in Missouri at the time.
Indeed, photography is totally subjective and a matter of taste.
I like the scene a lot, and especially the contrast between the yellow/green and the red foliage. But I would desaturate all colors except the colors that are already low in saturation a bit.
Never been to New England, unfortunately, so for my European eyes this is over the top 
Hey Han, The fall colors in New England really are that bright. When the fall colors are in full showing, the hills appear to be over saturated and very bright. The reds, yellows and oranges are difficult to imagine. I lived on the edge of the Ozark Mountains and it was the same there. Thank you for looking. I appreciate it.
Merle, it might be instructive to also post here the original un-editted raw file to give people a sense of what we are talking about regarding these colors.
I post a lot of New England fall foliage images here at NPN, and I often have to reduce saturation from the raw file and I still sometimes get comments that the colors don’t look real. With all apologies to @Han_Schutten , Merle your colors look very real to me, and are within the realm of personal taste.
