Low on High, Dark in Bright

Rosco headed up to Lake Shannon in the North Cascades mainly to use up an old roll of film.   The lake is accessible only via an unimproved,  gravel mountain road.  Once we got there, i realized that the lake was a man-made creation.  The late summer low water level exposed the "handiwork".   Basically humans went up to the mountain, bulldozed the shit out of the forest and then flooded it.  Voilá ... LAKE.   It was ghoulish, like a tree-stump cemetery. 

But, back home, pawing his photo-controls, Rosco learned to use the exposure and offset sliders.

 

This is the original photo as commercially scanned and without tweaking.

First tweak uses 27% auto tone correction + 17% midtone contrast + 17% blue highlight increase to do something about the wash-cycle grey sky.

The first tweak substantially livened an otherwise chromatically lifeless shot.  But what rosco discovered is that by using the exposure and offset controls together he can brighten up and shadow down the foto at the same time.  Whereas exposure affects the entire picture; offset works mainly (but not exclusively) on the mid tones.  The second tweak adjust exposure up .46 and offset down .-.0184  

Unfortunately an inevitable side effect of the second tweak was SkyTeal which Rosco hates.  So, for Tweak #3, he selected the sky area and adjusted Hue Saturation and Lightness to "blue" the sky.   "You have to be careful not to overdo it," he said.  "The trick is that the sky should not be darker or less hazy than the furthest point back -- in this case that little bump of mountain.   It has to blend."

Photoshop has a highlight/shadow and midtones control panel which produces similar results.  The difference is that "highlight & shadows" isolates the action to highlights and shadows.  Duh.   Exposure and offset produce more general results.  

Rosco wanted to make sure I put down that he realizes that upping the exposure just even a tad came close to blowing out parts of the shoreline.  He thinks those areas could be adjusted by using the Hi/Dows control; but he says he's too tired, the photo isn't that great anyways and he wants to go chew a bone now. 

So... I  did it for him.