Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Be sure that you are not confusing colour management and tonal adjustments. They're quite separate concepts.
It would pay to photograph a grey or white card in difficult lighting conditions but I'd expect that selecting daylight white balance would have you well on the way to getting correct colours in a daylight scene such as the one shown above. Then you just need to correct exposure and contrast and so on to your satisfaction (knowing that snow is trickier to handle than many other scenes).
There is rarely a single button solution to such problems but you can be lucky.
The more complex path is something like this but is always flexible:
1. Set the Adobe process and profile to what you're used to. I start with camera neutral and edit from there. Others prefer more vivid, less realistic images. This step is important because it affects other parameters without showing up on their adjustment scales. i.e. there is no obvious measure of how much it affects things like saturation, contrast, etc.
2. get the WB right, because it affects the histogram and exposure warnings and hence all of the other steps. Snow may or may not actually be white white but there might be white bits of clothing or whatever that you can use to set WB.
3. Set the exposure to get the brightest parts right, to avoid burnout.
4. Check / adjust contrast. This one is easy to do but so many other things affect the need for it that it sort of lives in every other step too. Some images need a major contrast tweak up or down but most do not.
5. Set the black level to get the dark areas right.
6. Set the fill light as required if the dark areas are too dark.
7. Set the brightness to fix the middle tones.
I generally avoid much if any recovery setting because it does weird things to so many images if high settings are used, and doesn't work as well as the method above for others.
- Alan
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