Plenty of high class crumpet in Downton Abbey, how about
Is she QU Refined?
Back to the challenge.
Last week I visited a National Trust property in Worcestershire that had a fine park as well as a interesting house and garden.
A dead tree in the park took my attention, trouble was it was a clear blue sky with no cloud interest and the sun was high in the sky; not ideal!
I took some shots and as an example it's shown below where I used QU to make it a little more interesting, I hope!
1st image: extracted jpeg; where's the blue sky gone? One good reason to use raw, no more blank skies.
2nd image: the QU default, more colour and reflects the actual scene which was relatively flat and needed a little more work.
3rd image: QU raw refined with a little highlight recovery on the tree and a tweak on fill, then edit.
Edit included Smart Colour Boost with the yellow row toned down a little and the blue & cyan rows tweaked to make the sky less pale and a little more saturated. Some extra contrast & EQ DFS was used.
I ought to return to that scene at a different time of year when the sun is lower and there's more atmosphere but that is not always possibe.
Terry
EDIT: Some more detail
I used a magenta rectangle top middle over the almost white branches and reduced the auto fill from 7 to 5. This gave more contrast and intilayy looked a little dark. However, I knew I would use SCB which would lift it again.
SCB with cyan & blue not ticked, gave 2.95 in the other rows.
I reduced the yellow row to 2.0 so the bright green of the sunlit grass was more subdued.
The cyan & blue rows were modified to 0.2, 0.5, 1.0 - interesting playing with those numbers!
Contrast was increased with a simple curve. DFS was EQ 20%, 100%, 6 radius.