[Zig]

In response to and inspired by, Toad's Tree; I know, I could have posted this in a technique's thread but wanted to preserve continuity somewhat.
I'm pretty sure most of you are au fait with this anyway but for those who aren't: catching those Autumn(sorry, "fall" for those across the Pond) colours can sometimes be an ephemeral search: often we're captivated by the strong light on leaves and foliage but our cameras will "stop down" given the amount of light coming in from the sky and even the highlights from the leaves themselves.
I usually make great(or overblown, actually) use of the dodge tool, set to around 4% on highlight mode, to restore the camera's wish to try and compensate for wide exposure values.
Below, using as fitting subject, the maples of Westonbirt Arboretum[nice gig, try to avoid the horrendous overpricing by parking somewhere else, you UK-ites!].
First is a straight conversion in Canon's Zoom Browser from raw to jpeg, standard everything:



Allllrightythen...here's the same image, same settings, this time using the dodge tool set as described above. I've also used a tad of blur and sharpened as "normal"...note that the colour alterations are all via the dodge tool...I've made no adjustments to saturation. In fact, often when I shoot this stuff, I convert and reduce the saturation and contrast just so I can gently build the image colours up "from the ground", as it were.
I hope I've not spoken down to anyone here and that this might be helpful.

[Wedding Shooter]

Very nice work Zig - thanks for the example.

[Irma]

I absolutely admire your dodge and burn technique Zig. Good time to practice with this autumn leaves...

Too much has to do I think, with the way one takes its pictures. I take them a bit dark so I end up most of the times with very colorful pictures. And dodge and burn is not exactly my strong point....

Thanks so much for sharing your technique. It is always very useful to know how to do this technique properly...

[Toad]

Great tip - I will definitely remember this one...

[wulinka]

wow! I'm impressed, your processing looks really nice and natural.

ULI