Sometimes you look at an image and you see that a lot of effort went into it. Sometimes it looks … plain. Maybe you like the composition, maybe you like the colors, maybe not even that. What you don’t see is that it made me sweat.
I suppose this is such an image. It was processed entirely in Lightroom, but I had to make all sorts of local adjustments to white balance, contrast, local contrast, vibrance and saturation. In this dappled light, the problem were the strong differences between the directly lit and the shaded parts of the ground.
It’s something you don’t see when you’re there. You just think, wow, what a nice image, compose, click, and you naturally expect it to be what you saw or believed to see.
It’s not. Colors in the shade are much too blue, washed out and lack contrast, while the sunny patches are a mess of contrasts, much too warm, always on the verge of burning out.
Later this year we’ll see the same concept again in my images of lavender fields in Provence: sometimes you have to lie in order to even remotely tell the truth.