I find this one quite challenging to edit, there’s a lot of dynamic range (it’s an HRD by averaging). I think there was some clouds in the sky so only parts are actually blue, and with all the leaves it’s hard to avoid artifacts and general mushiness.
A beautiful image!
I produced three exposures using nUFRaw (-.14, +2.80, +5.73) blended with enfuse. Into GIMP where I added a little sparkle to the water and slightly increased the contrast in the rocks.
Nice scene - and hard to have autumn leaves show their glory. I worked on lots of autumn images last weeks
This is my edit, with lots of renamed module comments - hope it’s helpful!
I use the color lut module for the leaves…you can just tweak the orange and yellow patches…actually using the skin tone patches can be nice too…nice way to introduce some orange or yellow…really fast without much thought… just tweak sat and if need be brightness…I am sure you can mask and use rgb color balance etc but this is fast and gives nice results…
Darktable with exposure fusion does a pretty good job straight away, you just have to figure out how you want to deal with the overcooked black bits (which I didn’t bother doing, would probably do masking)