I took a drive over to an area I’ve not explored before (it actually has a couple of small waterfalls!) so I’ll be back when conditions are more conducive. For one thing, the relatively best waterfall faces north and the sun is in the south, so spring will probably be better.
Anyway, on the way home I drove over a small river – named “Little River”, strangely enough – where I’ve previously noticed how the autumn sun shines right down the channel when it gets low in the sky. It was early afternoon and I’ve seen this same view much later in the day when it’s even better but nonetheless this time I turned around and did something about it. While the viewpoint from the shore isn’t sufficient to capture the “tunnel of light” effect straight down the channel (really need to sit out in the middle in a boat) it turned into a nice composition, I think, nonetheless.
Processed in ART 1.21 with minor touch-up in Affinity Photo.
I did some tests, but I ended up liking yours more, so I loaded your arp and cut out part of the foreground and some light, not very significant changes. Nice Shot.
Another beautiful photo, Len. I live in a similar part of the country, and I recognize the natural colors, so I didn’t feel a need to amp them up. dt 4.4.2
Looking now after I posted it, I keep imagining the yellows are just ever so slightly greenish. But I did nothing to them, locally nor globally, and the white balance doesn’t look green to me. I’d have to compare against reality I guess. It’s not enough for me to alter the image, though.
So I decided rather than chasing ultra sharpness and detail I applied the watercolor preset in the diffuse or sharpen module in DT. I reined in the effect using the opacity slider. I preferred this preset over the bloom option. I also imagine some of the filters in GIMP could be effective with this image.
The foreground here is actually closer to how it looked than my version (it was just a touch darker in person). I went for a slightly darker-than-literal rendering in order to more enforce “vision travel”, i.e., starting at the dark bottom foreground and moving to the bright background. But yours in more strictly realistic.
I only lightened the foreground because of the soft effect I was going for. On my sharper versions that I did not post here, I too went for a dark foreground to drag the viewers eye towards the autumn colors of the trees.
Great photo! Thanks for sharing …
I used contrast equalizer to slightly decrease the sharpness in the trees and bushes, while increasing the contrast in the reflections in the water …
I did my usual trick in the water of dropping the shadows only, slight desaturation and an even slighter faint bluish cast, all through a gradient mask.
