As promised, here is my take on this image:
First, in Lightroom:
- I worked with the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks and cropped the image from the bottom. I also played around with the white balance and finally I moved the image into Photoshop.
In Photoshop:
- The first thing I did was to use a Lights luminosity mask to select the very bright areas of the water and brought them down using a levels adjustment.
- Then, I tried the “Make it Glow” action from the TK9 panel. I try this on my images some of the time (actually a lot lately) because it sometimes adds a nice saturation boost and added glow to an image but other times it just doesn’t look good. Here I liked the effect though.
- Next I used another action/tool from the TK9 panel and that was the Paint Contrast tool. I used it to enhance the contrast in the water of the creek.
- Next, was my obligatory vignette.
- Then I used another levels adjustment through a darks mask to slightly lighten the very dark areas of the image to slightly decrease the overall contrast.
- Next was a Brightness/Contrast layer with a light mask to target the water and darken it a bit more.
- Then I used the LIGHTS Triple Play to add a bit more micro-contrast and detail back to the water.
- And finally I did some cleaning up with the Remove tool to get rid of a couple bright areas in the very top left corner of the image.
