Two that needed more work

From the same walk the other day, but I struggled to do these justice at first - now I think they are okay.

The first is so simple , yet very effective. Please give some more details of how you improved them.

The second reminds me of sleepy hollow !!

I was thinking that! Really like them both. As always, great images.

Can't complain about either but I do like the 2nd one !

Thanks for the comments

I'm not one for spending hours or working on minute areas of images to "improve" them, and I'm not a big fan of sharpening - so most of my images are processed in less than a minute. The originals of this pair were quite dark and contrasty so the challenge was to make them look as close to how I saw them as I could.

I use LightRoom 6.something (standalone) and the obvious actions with dark and contrasty images would be to increase the exposure and lower the contrast - but that has the by-product of making them look a little "flat". My approach is too reduce the Highlights and increase Shadow details as a starting point - taking care to not kill off the impact of bursts of light or make an image that looks as though it has been taken with "fill-in flash". Then a reduction in contrast and slight increase in exposure (I tend to shoot with -1/3 or 2/3 exposure compensation as standard) and then a tweak of whites and blacks to give the overall "look" I want. I don't add sharpening, but I sometimes use the "Clarity" slider - and quite often I reduce it (the Woodland Path shot was reduced a fair amount) but when I want a little more "edge contrast" I increase the clarity a little.

Hope that makes sense, and maybe helps someone?

Great point about the clarity slider for busy scenes, it can really hurt the 'painting' effect if overused.

Thanks John... always good to hear a photographers approach. i agree with the short processing time also. It can be too easy for it to actually become a chore, and then end up binning the image

Lenny, do you use LR? If so on the first try going to the green luminance channel in the HSL and increase it, you'll see the green lighten up and start to pop. Also in the Calibration section, increase the blue saturation slider. The blue's will go funky but you can desaturate them later in HSL but the other colours will really pop.