@afre, taking your suggestion from the other thread, I went a-looking for a decent PlayRaw candidate out of this morning’s walkabout images. Instead of the cabin snap in the Morning Light thread, I chose a landscape I shot a few hundred feet down the road.
This image in my mind is about textures, the clumps of snow dappling the trees. There’s not a lot of color here, but what color there is serves to communicate some notion of depth. I lightened up the linear rgb with @McCap’s doublelogistic curve, which kept some definition in the snow by not flattening out so much like filmic does. I also cropped to improve the composition. In rawproc:
Always difficult for me to find the sweet spot between nailing the lightness of the scene and preserving the details in the highlights in winter scenes.
When I posted the image, I was thinking, “there’s not a lot to do with this one, no extreme colors to wrangle, no shadow detail to lift”. As usual, I was wrong…
Very nice renditions, all. Was thinking last night about what we do here, and it came to me that there’s no one way to make it look right, but many wonderful ways to make it not look wrong…
Tried a second one … in fact it is number six!
As the sun is present in this scene, I decided to give it even more contrast than in my other try. And cropping away the birch trunk helps too.
Those are aspens, the Colorado state pest tree… just kidding. They’re what make famous our fall foliage, with their round yellow leaves providing color contrast to the evergreens in which they intersperse. They’re a network-rooting tree, and they propagate along those roots to form some of the world’s largest single organisms. Folks who plant aspens in their yards end up with a mess of them, sprouting in places they’d rather not have trees. But, they work up in the mountains, go figure…
Thanks for clarification! This sounds a bit like the bamboo bush I have in the garden which must be checked from time to time if it sprouts at the other side of a hedgerow in the midst of a walkway.
At least you can use the aspen bark as an analgesic as it contains salicylic acid
Little known fact: Bamboo is the world’s largest grass. It is difficult to control and almost impossible to kill.
I learned this because one time a ran over some bamboo my neighbor had planted at our property line. She came out screaming at me that she had planted it and wanted it to grow. I looked at it, shrugged, and having no real idea, told her, “Don’t worry, it will grow back.” It did.