When shooting brightly lit aspen leaves against a blue sky, it is hard to avoid blowing out the leaves. I like to use a polarizer to reduce glare, and underexpose to the histogram. This often results in a sky that is too dark as shown here.
I used a gradient mask on the entire sky even behind the tree at about +1. Then I also used hue saturation in the blue channel where I reduced saturation and lightness.
Here are my results. I am including a SOOC for you to work with.
Thanks Scott. This was taken near Flaming Gorge last week, hand held while I was double parked by the highway. The local aspen are just starting so I wanted some advice for both shooting and post processing.
Here's one that's just slightly different. I did the following in Lightroom:
- Increased blue and orange luminance
- Added a graduated filter to the sky so that it goes from dark at the top to light (yours is slightly lighter at the very top than further down)
-Increased clarity
-Increased vibrance and decreased saturation
-Increased saturation on green, orange and yellow
-Increased exposure
-Cropped
-Cloned out stuff on the right
-Sharpened it a bit
Good job, I will try to find the equivalent stuff in ACR or Photoshop and try it out. I got all of it covered but not sure the best way to increase specific channel luminance in Photoshop.
You have a nice even sky with a good color.
Edit:
I figured out luminance by channel in ACR, I seldom go to that page.
I couldn't help myself, I had to mess with your image... First, it is a very nice image with a Bright, Blue, monochromatic sky... I ran it through LR4, Nik software and CS5... Mostly I just played with Tonal contrast, Vibrance, and content aware fill... You will note the limbs, upper right, are gone and the foreground log has lengthened... I eliminated the small patch of road on lower, left corner... Hope I did not mess it up too bad... Jim
