Creative Effects Challenge No. 169 - RAW Oriental Garden Scene

Well, it's time to give my choice among all those creative and imaginative answers. It was really hard to decide.

I have chosen to give an advantage to those who tried to solve the depth sense without noticeable cropping. A crop challenge  would also have been extremely interesting!

I wanted to give the first prize to the improved sense of depth with natural looking, I hesitated between  Billy Jean (Lillias) and hmca (Helen);  My preferred one the the one from Lillias.

I also wanted to give a prize to one of the best ideas to solve the depth problem. PeteB has found a very effective color solutions I would never have thought of.

Then curiously, I did not get many attempts to solve the problem by a robust use of blur/sharpness, so kudos to Pete61 for its very effective and still realistic result.

Of course, I was delighted to see all the creative interpretations with cropping and color effects, thanks to all for working on the subject.

My personal attempts were based on the ideas that the base image was already sharp enough with good depth of field and mostly very saturated.

Playing on the existing depth of field was challenging. I managed to create a mask based on the details in foliage to separate the 'in focus' parts from the less sharp parts on the foreground and background. Not very effective all in all, any manual masking would have been easier and more convincing. When you want to enhance some parts, the solution is often to 'tone' down the surrounding parts by using desaturation, detail blur or negative clarity. That helps a lot with the very saturated bridge. I also wanted to see if the depth of field guided edit could be used in a different context than the usual gradient from foreground to background. Using the elliptical gradient was good enough and switching to the 'expert' mode kept the mask which I was able to fine tune manually.