Strong Natural Color and Detail.

[DeMorcan]

Trying to give shorter tips for those who use Photoshop and are interested. In Lightroom, I used Olympus natural color profile. Sharpening as 0.5 radius at 25%. I lightened the shadows and did some noise reduction in Studio 2. There were no other adjustments. No clarity, contrast, dehaze or anything that removes the natural look. In Photoshop, I did a sky replacement layer with a magenta summer sky. I color adjusted it and applied contrast to as well as Lightroom noise reduction to match the photo. It is just a one of Photoshops supplied skies although you may not recognize it if you searched. This can also be used for haloless detail and many times is all that is needed. Although I gave a more complete explanation of extracting maximum detail, sometimes you do not need that.

Then I made one adjustment layer to bring out the colors and detail/texture. This is an old technique, but I do not see it used much online now. It was more for prints where everything had to be right. On a video display, it is hard to counter the digital look. I made a contrast/brightness layer. Since I wanted to keep the natural contrast and work with the color, I used the color blend mode. I then put the contrast very high. Started at 100 and then ended up in the 90s. This makes each shade of a color slightly different so there is color contrast without luminous contrast to the light and dark areas. Then I used the brightness control to adjust the saturation. In the color blend mode, the brightness controls the saturation (a little more complicated in reality, but that is the end result). It had some effect on the apparent image brightness as less saturated colors appear lighter. You can see the colors move in the histogram. I then did a saturation and lowered saturation just a little for video display and signed it. This was the only adjustments I made to this. If not for the sky replacement this would have easily been a 4 minute edit. As always click on it to see it as the message sized photos are blurred.