Raw photo.

2. Darken background w/ masking (focusing on blacks and darks, leave highlights alone because it will get rid of the delightful little bokeh on the water surface. Also popped the saturation & warmed up white balance)

3. Run De-noise (not necessary per-se, but pulls some details back into some of the feathers and I'm a recovering pixel peeper.)

4. Final touches: open in photoshop and dodge/burn the particles in the water, and around the backlit feathers to pull a little more contrast/saturation. Also took a little saturation out of the lightest feathers of the ducklings bc they pulled too orange for me, and knocked the white balance a little more green - the whole image was feeling a little too pink for me.

Full-size before and afters.

This is pretty much the exact process I follow with backlit images. I try to keep most of my edits "true to life" - but there is a lot of subjectivity in that statement lol.

So I've been playing Monster Hunter with my SO and have made perhaps the most cursed colorblind shader I can think of. Basically, they have blue-yellow blindness, so what I've done here is isolate those colors (well, the best I know how to) and replace them with plaid. Blue is now red plaid, yellow is now green plaid lmao.

Some parts of the game are absolutely gorgeous this way

Some parts are functional if not a little obnoxious

Some parts are downright hilarious.

Poison is typically a blue-purple color, so in this shader it turns into a hot pink plaid lmao. Idk I just find something so hilarious about plaid poison hurtling towards me. I think the raw contrast needs to be boosted in some areas of the game, and they haven't plaid with it quite yet but uh, this was fun nonetheless! My eariler attempt had both of them red / green plaid, but that looked especially ugly underwater, so I started using monochrome plaids, but still here's the general principle

The fragility of the refraction of feelings. A moving examination of feelings and human minds in the face of fragility.