Here I tried to emphasize all the beautiful texture and depth without crushing all the awesome shadow detail. The sky was not actually as blown as I initially thought it would be and it was not too difficult to recover. The hard part was trying to prevent some false color halos in the leaves. I needed to go with Amaze+VNG4 with a false color suppression step. The false color issue is by no means your fault I found that quite common when you get fine textures like leaves against a blue sky. Hopefully you enjoy my rendition.
RT 5.8 (Click the image to few in larger size looks much better then the thumbnail. Even better if applied to the raw in RT.)… I hate Jpeg lol.
In my opinion it is bad idea to preserve the sky, because the attempts to do so deteriorate the realism of the scene and because it is not an essential element.
Technical note: this RAW file is a good example for noticeable color shifts caused by Avoid color shift in RawTherapee.
When I develop, I try to eliminate overexposed, underexposed, and out-of-gamut areas. I first obtained something I liked and then went back and adjusted it until I achieved that end. However, this doesn’t look as good as I would like. I checked some of the other dt images, and found that they had substantial areas overexposed, underexposed, or out-of-gamut. Will this not matter if these images were printed? What would those areas look like?
P4170435_10.orf.xmp (14.5 KB)
I was working on my understanding of channel mixer and tried mainly to do something with the sky. Kept the rest of the image to a more muted look. Used channel mixer five times.
Edit: I didn’t realize until step 14 that base curve was still on; at that point I turned it off.