The sun was coming up behind the mountains in the east behind some clouds. I thought it would make a nice shot, so here it is.

April looking out over a valley. This image is (I think) the first HDR I’ve shot with a person. The light was low as the day was nearing sunset, so I bracketed the shot to capture the cloud details and details in the foliage.

Aqua is a color and is also Latin for “water”. Here’s two shots that fill both interpretations. The first is the Grand Prismatic in Yellowstone National Park. The other is Koh Phi Phi Le in Thailand.

Original Image After HDR Merge

One of the problems, so it seems when shooting outdoors in bright light is that exposure seemed to have a yellow tinge to them. If the same shot was shot under cloud cover or when the sun was not beating down, the foliage would appear green. The yellow tinge is obviously caused by the sun’s bright yellow light beating down from overhead. Fixing this in post processing is rather simple with a few basic steps. (Not a real complex how-to, but I find myself doing this quite often, so I thought I’d share how I make foliage greener.)

1.) Slide the yellow hues toward green

Adjust Yellow Hue

2.) Darken the green channel’s luminance

Adjust Green Luminance

Finally, make any other adjustments you want…I saturated the blue some to give the sky more definition and cropped the image some to.

Final Image

April and I went trekking (not really!) to these waterfalls…here’s the shots.