This is a look at the unnamed brook just below the seasonal waterfall as it spreads out under this lovely yellow birch. Without any greening of the undergrowth, things are a bit sparser and the brook a bit more center stage. There are some interesting choices to be made here with regard to processing and I made some, avoided making others. It will be interesting to see how others approach this photo and those decisions.
You may only download this file to demonstrate how you would process the image. The file is Copyright of the photographer, and you must delete the raw file when you are done. Please post a jpg of what you created, explain what you did, and why you did it.
A beautiful scene! I tried to give your edit no more than a glance, and developed the raw file to my taste, with my usual workflow. I rarely do many local edits, unless they are obviously needed.
I opened the file in DxO PL6. There is no color profile available for your camera to my surprise, I selected the rendering for the GH6. Lens corrections and mild lens-dependent sharpening, with the correct lens selection. Noise reduction (Deep Prime XD), with luminance noise reduction at 10 out of 100. Exported as .dng with corrections applied.
I then developed the resulting raw file in Picture Window Pro 7. I prefer this workflow over exporting as tiff, because PWP works in HSV or HSL color space when developing a raw file. In this case it is probably less important, but in my experience HSV preserves bright colors better than RGB (that changes all bright colors into white, in the limit). I simply kept to my habit.
With the resulting tif image (in PWP): changed the color balance based on the white foam near the rock left of the center of the image, at about 40% of the bottom. This removes a magenta cast. Expanded to full brightness range, applied a curve to add a bit of real black and increased mid-tone contrast. Increased saturation in HSV with 15%, preserving high and low saturation.
Resized to 50% of the original image size and sharpened a little with radius 1, threshold 2 and 50% (these values can’t be compared to those in Photoshop, unfortunately).
I hope, that the result has something of the atmosphere of a brook in a wood. Not too bright, not too much contrast.
Thanks so much for the interest and the time @Han_Schutten - your result is similar, but more somber in feel, than mine. I kind of like it for that since it creates some separation from my experience of being there. Sometimes that blunts one’s creativity when it comes to post processing. I’m surprised the G9 wasn’t found either, but the GH6 is probably close when it comes to colors. Interesting how you addressed them in PWP, a program I’m not at all familiar with. Nice job doing what you did. It has a low-key, natural feel.
Your image is inviting enough to spend some time. Glad you at least like it a bit @Kris_Smith. Your brook definitely has more glamour than mine . And I certainly like your version.
By the way, if I compare the 2 jpg’s side by side, there seems to be more detail in my version. Doing justice to the excellent lens that you used. Maybe some is lost in the resizing that you did for NPN? Otherwise the credits go to Photolab, that has very good optical corrections.
. And I certainly like your version.