About that Church with Smoke in the Hills

DOM = Diocese Of Monterrey ? = Dominion Of Monkeys ?

I've decided to print this photo of the Davenport Church taken during our last wildfire. I'm going to share my processing steps from Raw file to print. This is my workflow today, but this really isn't meant to be a tutorial as much as a quick behind the screen peek of how far I'll go to just barely improve an image.

Camera: D700
Lens: 24-70 Nikkor
ISO 200, F5.6 1/1000

Original image from Raw file converted in Capture NX2. Lightroom just couldn't get the colors right. The Capture/D700 preset was Neutral with a slight Saturation boost+1. The color and feel were pretty well represented so I skipped any initial color work.

The sun was pretty strong so any contrast improvement needed to be subtle, but I knew I wanted more green in the foliage, so here's what I did. The Blue Channel although weak, added a lot to the blue starved dark sky so, taking the image into Photoshop, I did a Luminosity Blend of 75% Green Channel into the Blue Channel. I then added some slight steepness to the important areas in the Green and Red Channel with Curves. This lightened the image some and enhanced the green, but I really wanted to keep the sky dark, so I just masked out the sky using the Red Channel and brushed in less masking over the main greenery. I couldn't easily find a cleaner way to do it although I did muck around with Blend If both in RGB and LAB mode. All in all not much improvement.

Next, I just played it simple and returned to Lightroom were I first cleaned some micro dust spots from the sensor and then cropped, straightened, added a slight S-Curve, a tad of Vibrance and finally a slight Vignette. The image was then sent back to Photoshop for Sharpening were the amount was/will be variable depending on the size of the print. Sharpening was masked from the sky and performed on the Luminance Channel in LAB mode with Blend-If subtracting the effect from the brightest and darkest areas. Whew, but all in all it took maybe 5 minutes. I'll be very tempted to somehow get rid of that car before I actually print, but for now, It's back to the kitchen for some tea and crumpets.

Final for now - a slight allignment issue remains
It's tempting to crop it tighter, but this photo really is about a most unusual sky, so I'm not sure yet how I'll print this. Maybe cropped for smaller prints and not for large ?? That car is really bugging me now. ...