The frost turned this dried, brown pile of leaves into a thing of beauty.
Specific Feedback Requested
Any comments are welcome.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
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Indeed, it is a thing of beauty! Great color and texture. The only nit I see is that vertical twig in the URC. Maybe just burning it down a bit so it’s not so prominent? Otherwise, this is very cool.
count me in, very nice frosty leaves, great detail and nice overall presentation
I love the look of this and the subtle shifting color. It almost makes me think of dragon scales. The symmetry of the two pointiest leaves that kiss the edge of the frame are very pleasing to the eye. The vertical piece mentioned by Bonnie does break the visual flow a bit for me. But even just burning it back from the edge would make a world of difference I think. I’m not sure the orientation is the issue so much as that there is a bright thing leading the eye out of the top corner. Very beautifully composed and processed piece!
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Chris, the repeated shapes in these frosty leaves look great. The mix of browns adds a subtle touch of warmth. Finding small bits like this in the midst of a large collection is a challenge that you’ve handled very well.
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I’ve been revisiting this shot for days now, Chris. The frost is so uniform and dense. In addition to some of the suggestion around the vertical leaf curl, would be to maybe do some luminosity masking to achieve greater separation between the frost thicknesses and the leaves themselves. I wouldn’t go too crazy, but the texture and shape of the frost itself might be accentuated this way. Maybe I’ll have a go at it and show you what I mean if it works to the image’s benefit. There is a softness here that shouldn’t be overburdened with sharpness and so it has to be done lightly.
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Elegant!! I agree about the piece in the UR, and very curious what @Kris_Smith comes up with.
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Ok, so chores done and I had a go with this in Photoshop -
Besides some cloning I used a couple darks and lights luminosity masks to further separate the tonalities, I used a couple of color masks to increase saturation and alter the shade of yellow, I used the add clarity high-pass filter as well and dialed back the opacity and fill so it wouldn’t be too crunchy. I hope you like it. It’s an absolute smasher of a shot.
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@Kris_Smith Wow! Thanks for taking the time with this. It looks great. Your comments sound like a foreign language to me 
Photoshop speak. I am just learning Lightroom. I guess I have a long way to go, but this is encouraging.
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@Mark_Seaver @Norma_Tareila-Matley @Diane_Miller @Bonnie_Lampley @Adam_Klaum Thanks to all for your comments.
I like this one. Mostly, I think because we rarely get this kind of frost and even when we do, so few trees around here have interesting leaves. I liked what Kristen did but feel it is a bit “too” hard, even a bit too much to the crunchy side. I too used masks, but I used 3 tonal masks, one light, one medium and one medium dark. On each I used a color grading layer and in general only used the toning slider, leaving the color alone except on the medium tonal mask where I bumped up the orange to reds. I did do a bit of burning at about 6% on the brighter parts of the leaves and, like Kris, gave it a 35% Clarity bump for better clarification between the leaf layers.
It’s just another POV. One thing though, if you are just getting into LR, try some of the presets in the RAW editor. I just did one using a Portrait, Red04 and got pretty close to Kris’s edit and reduced by 40% on a layer mask, pretty close to my edit.
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@chris10 Thank you for your detailed feedback. I greatly appreciate it. I’ll be sure to give the LR presets a try.
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