Not if it's a watercolour or pen and ink cartoon

Steve

You're too modest. Centaurea = Perennial Cornflower .

Nos. 1, 2 and 11 stand out for me. Nicely composed and shot, and the yellow and purple of Jacob's Ladder is a lovely colour combination (complementary colours on the colour wheel?).

Steve

Yes, No. 2 for me too.

No. 4 would be a strong contender if it were cropped just below the two lumps sticking out of the water in the foreground. Too strong a pull towards the bottom at the moment, the crop would help the eye be drawn into the distance. In fact, until I blanked out the bottom on the screen, I didn't even see the second red 'beacon' (on the RH side). And the resulting wide-screen format helps to emphasise the flow of the river from L to R (or vice versa?).

Hope that helps.

Steve

Looking forward to seeing pictures of you spring lambs gambolling in green fields with not a care in the world.

Steve

Thanks for all your suggestions. After some experimentation, I can announce that the result is ... (drum roll...) ... none of the above. Highlight correction was 'off' in camera and in software. WB produced 'interesting' changes to the sky but not much change to the sun. Other software settings seemed OK and compatible with camera settings.

However... some wild experimentation with Affinity Photo (which is what I'm most familiar with) suggests that the problem relates to how the blue channel is processed. The only blue is in the sun and (quite reasonably) it's contentrated at the RH end of the histogram. Reducing blue at the far RH end (via Curves) brings yellow bands to the sun, which is reasonable because R+G+B = white, R+G = yellow. The precise result was very sensitive to the adjustment made. Which suggests to me that the differences in the sun are the result of small differences in the way the RAW engines deal with a pretty extreme case where one of the channels is way up against the RH end of the histogram. If blue were dominant, the differences wouldn't be very obvious to the eye, but when the blue is mainly balancing the R and G to give white, a small difference is giving a noticeable change in colour.

How does that sound?

Steve

Yep, understood and agreed.

What surprised me is the big differences for the sun. And that DCU 5 was so far from the camera jpg, which is the first time that's happened for me (or perhaps I've not noticed it before or just been lucky!). I've always understood that Ricoh/Pentax intended DCU 5 to simulate in-camera processing as a starting point i.e. by default it gets the camera settings from the raw file and applies them, you can then change them if you wish.

Incidentally, it's worth adding that the jpg images posted above are a good likeness of what I saw on the screen before saving to jpg. The different suns are therefore not an artefact of jpeg compression.

Some experimenting to be done today... looks like it's going to be too hot to do anything in the garden.

Steve

Is this the dawning of the Old Age of Aquarius?

Steve

Thanks folks, back from the dog walk and just read your thoughts/suggestions. I'll try them tomorrow, too late to do anything intellectually challenging this evening.

Steve

Thanks, both.
Interesting suggestion, I'll check. The camera was (and always is) set to daylight WB. If I decide later to change the WB, it's done during RAW processing.

Steve

Just done some major surgery on my beard - it has the same effect.

Steve