this turned out quite painterly....
That wasn't really the objective, but I kind of like it. Shot at Twin Lakes on the Six Rivers National Forest in northern California.
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...including lens profile corrections and chromatic aberration removal, but no sharpening or noise reduction. Then into Photoshop where I used Nik filters for noise removal (Dfine2) and selective exposure adjustment (Viveza 2-- the shadows were quite dark and the light areas close to blown out in the original camera raw image). I used Nik Color Efex Pro 4 to add tonal contrast and detail enhancement filters, then reduced the image size and used Sharpener Pro 3 to sharpen. I mostly used the default settings for the Nik filters but applied them selectively to the trees and water to avoid creating artifacts in the sky, although I dialed back the default sharpening settings because the image looked a bit too crunchy with full sharpening applied. Interestingly, it's the exact same workflow and settings that produced the image below, which was shot just minutes earlier:
Nikon D7200, ISO 1000, Tokina AT-X 12-28mm at 15mm, f/9.0, 1/500s.
