... Actually this is one of my least processed shots, except for the sky, which was masked in PS... I think that's a complement, Slobodan?
Yes, it was a compliment to you on the "least processed" ... and a warning to Fike not to provoke you
As another Dave (Isle of Sky) asked in another thread, are we really that obsessed with processing that we have to improve Mother Nature EVERY time? I mean, I am as guilty of that as the next guy, but my workflow of periodically returning to the image to view it with fresh eyes enables me to keep that temptation in check. I find that, more often than not, my further processing actually scales back the excess and returns it closer to the more "natural," original stage.
It was July, people! Hot and humid. David was on the river, on top of that. A lot of natural haze there. If we "normalize" every aspect of life and nature, producing equally sharp and crispy images (read: maximum sharp and crispy) then we are going to end up with that dreaded digital "plastic" look. All the perfection, all the time.
Just say NO! Keep those little imperfections, those telltale signs of real life. Not every sky has to be tornado-dramatic, or kitchen pot-blue.
If, however, in a hypothetical scenario, a magazine editor or stock agency asks David for a super crispy, bleedingly sharp shot of that basilica and he has only that hazy one, then, by all means, go ahead and process it until you get the last drop of crispness out of it.
Other than that scenario, if we process all our images to the same clinical perfection, removing all the signs of real life from it, how are we going to remember, ten or twenty years from now, that European vacation moment as hazy, hot, and humid?
Imagine David, talking to his sweetheart twenty years from now and looking at that basilica picture: "Ah, honey, sweet memories... remember that European vacation when... I applied that super-duper, secret recipe mask* in Photoshop to make the sky above Germany look like a Tornado Alley one?
* A telltale sign of that mask (the dark halo around the basilica's dome):
