About the Image(s)

This beautiful backlit red-leaved plant was shot in bright sunlight from a trail in a nature park in the early afternoon a few weeks ago in late autumn/fall. It was a challenge to do it justice. Firstly the trail/path was quite narrow and I was limited to 100 mm on the wide end of a 100-500 lens. I backed up but found the image of the plant was incomplete so took two photos in portrait mode for stitching as a panorama in CR before saving for further edits in photoshop.
I edited out the blown-out bright spots in the background and a few on some of the leaves, the goal being to have the backlit red leaves dominating the image. The tree-trunk on the left was de-shadowed and spots were removed. Some of the leaves had caught dark shadows so I used a brush as a mask to select individual red leaves for de-shadowing and brightening. I made the center relatively bright with a brush to create a partial vignette effect. To create some more overall contrast I added some more tree-trunk using content-aware.