Thank you all for the comments.
My goal with image processing here was to take a rainy, overcast night and add some visual texture. I took this photo intentionally on such a night so that the water in the wetland would have lots of light in it. But this left the trees basically all the same shade of black.
So, contrast was pushed up to a remarkable extent. Using Lightroom, I upped contrast directly, then pushed shadows and pulled blacks. Finally, with the trees on the horizon and the foreground plain, I added a generous amount of "clarity," which is basically local contrast. The main artifact from this is that it created an apparent fog between layers of trees, which certainly wasn't actually there, but seems to add to the image without making it look fake.
The sky gave me fits. There's a graduated filter that goes +100 in contrast, and -100 in both highlights and shadows. To the naked eye, the sky looked almost perfectly uniform. This pulled out some texture in the clouds. The main artifact from this is that the top of the tree on the right looks like it is in more of a shadow than it actually was, although this creates a nice contrast against the light clouds and works far better than if the tree branches had halos around them.
Finally, the star burst just right of center had a strong yellow color, which I found quite distracting; most of the original image is magenta and brown. I couldn't get any local edits to look like I wanted. So, I changed the white balance to make that light nearly pure yellow, added some global desaturation, and then almost entirely desaturated the yellow channel. This gives the image an almost pre-dawn light, compared to the magenta/purple of the city light, but one thing I learned early is that the marvelous glow of nighttime city photos is entirely artificial anyhow, which makes white balance truly a matter of taste.
That bluish horizontal line of light on the left between the water and the trees is a bicycle headlight; that's one of our busiest pedestrian pathways. I had been afraid that this would take away from the image, being something that isn't recognizable subject matter, but nobody seems to have complained yet.
Here's a look at how it changed (click through to see 100% crop):
5549 comparison on
Flickr
As an aside, I've had this camera for about a year now and it continues to impress me.
Post #1 by JonPB
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