I finally had some time over the weekend to have a go at processing this image. I find the whole exercise of editing images that I didn’t shoot myself rather enjoyable and because I don’t have the associated memory of shooting the image, I feel freer to take the image in any direction that I feel suits it best. With that said, here is what I did:
- I opened the image up in ACR and did some basic edits – white balance, exposure, contrast, shadows, and highlights. I also cropped the image in this step.
- Next, I cloned out some of the distracting bright “spots” in the image.
- Then I slightly desaturated the bright area of trees to the left of center. I only did this a little bit because it looked unnatural when I took it too far. Ideally I would spend more time on this and get rid of the brightness entirely.
- Next, I brought the image into the NIK Vivaza plugin to give the image a bit of “structure”, and I darkened down the sky and lightened up the tree.
- Then some of TK’s LIGHTS and DARKS Triple Play to add some micro contrast to the light and dark areas of the image.
- Next, I used curves to brighten the image and add even more contrast.
- Then a cool “photo filter” to decrease the warmth.
- Then a color balance adjustment layer to decrease the reds (add cyan), increase the greens (reduce magenta), and decrease the blue (to add yellow).
- And finally, I cloned out the 2 black/dark areas on the beach on the left edge of the frame.
