Thought some of you might enjoy playing with an autumnal photo. We just missed the peak colors for this area by about a week. This is in western North Carolina and at the northern edge of where Hurricane Helene did her main damage last year.
Here is a barebones JPG from the RAW with almost no edits (I didn’t include an XMP as there is really nothing there to see as far as edits go, but there is a lot of color in the RAW file to play with):
Yes; did some clone work; thought about completely replacing the sky, but refrained (and, in my opinion, the worst part of my result). Why such a pretty scene had ugly clouds saddens me, though. lol
Thanks to everyone who has played with the pic. I find vivid colors in autumn leaves hard to deal with sometimes because I always want to bring up the colors and sharpen the leaves, but that always looks unnatural. So I try to dim the colors a bit, which makes them not the actual color. And in this shot the sun coming in bright in the top right added some additional difficulty for me to deal with as well as all of the branches intruding on the left of the frame (the better shots I took were from farther to the right).
