Must be fall colours time again.

Jasii · Sep 29, 2015

Nice shot Tim. How did you post process this one please? Did you use selective coloring here? The place looks kinda familiar, very similar where you had posted of light filtering through the trees. I may be wrong though.

Tim Tucker · Sep 29, 2015

Jasii said:
Nice shot Tim. How did you post process this one please? Did you use selective coloring here? The place looks kinda familiar, very similar where you had posted of light filtering through the trees. I may be wrong though.

Yes same place, if you look to the left of the couple you'll see the pattern of leaves.

No, no colouring, the effect is entirely produced by the light shining through the leaves rather than being reflected off them. You get none of the specular reflections that are common with light reflected off leaves, and therefore none of the blue wavelengths. Light filtered through leaves can be a little more intense and it is quite natural, I've not really pushed the colour.

Shot into the light the contrast and DR are quite high. Processing was in two stages to bring the contrast down and separate the leaves from the background. Apart from default first stage sharpening this was the camera raw processing:

In CS6 I continued much the same. I separated the foreground from the background by modifying the lights luminosity mask, the contrast was reduced in the background a little further (the slightly softer contrast of the background helps accentuate the colour on the leaves), and the foreground leaves with the edge highlights were softened by a very mild 'orton' effect.

Edit: I was a little sneaky here as I opened the image as a smart object with no editing and created a set of luminosity masks that had the greatest separation between foreground and background, I then re-edited the smart obtect in camera raw to bring them closer together.