So this one got some more than just the usual ‘adjust contrast, desaturate, increase vibrance’ treatment. After seeing what someone made of my fog post with some local contrast etc, I thought I’d experiment a bit. So I first did some work on the overall picture, toning down highlights, increasing ambiance, desaturating and setting the white balance a bit further to the cold side.
But then I added some extra darkening to the shadows of the road to increase its local contrast and lit up the shadowy regions of the mountains. Somehow that makes the image work a lot better now imho.
If you find one that’s not a subscription service and is able to read DNG’s weird color correction matrix tell me, I’ll be all ears. But so far I had no luck and not for lack of investing time in the search…
I use CaptureOne (it’s a sub, but I believe they have a lifetime option; I just didn’t want to shell out until I was sure I liked it). If you want to sent me a RAW file, I will give it a go!