Saturation: The vividness of a color’s hue. Saturation measures the degree to which a color differs from a gray of the same darkness or lightness.
As is always the case with landscape photography, I can’t control the weather. And while out for this image the weather was moody with periods of sad and dreary. What I can control after the fact is saturation & light levels within my editing software. In this image I just wanted to show the difference between the lighting on the road and the lighting right next to the road, all while again showing off the myriad of colors in the trees. What I ended up with wasn’t what I was after, it went beyond that to an over saturated “artsy” image. I have found that a lot of my images end up this way. And I think I know why. The photograph is never as good as we “remember” that sunset, or that mountain. So to compensate for that I take the colors somewhere above where they should be to where I remember them. Because in that sunset pic, or this landscape pic those colors were vibrant and filled my view.
And here we have photo that is at best seen on a 48″ screen…. Clearly another case of overcompensation. But that’s OK! Its a good looking image regardless of its size. (IMO)