DC Cherry Blossoms - Post Processing Advice Requested

I woke up at dawn and took a few shots before going to work last week. I'm a little disappointed in my post processing of these and feel there is more to them.

I took exposure bracketed sets of all of these shots, however in post processing I was able to get a lot out of the single exposures and have done no HDRs yet.

Please give advice on how to make these stand out a bit better.

Thanks!

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Here's a quick edit on the first one - exposure up, vibrance up, and contrast up.

Here's another one:

Exposure, vibrance, contrast, reduce highlights, and highpass sharpening.

Great compositions.

Love the second and third picture.

For the third picture, I would try to use flash to bring out the color of the cherry blossoms, currently they are in the shadows

3 and 4 are your winners here. Number 1, the crane kills it )clone it out?) Number 2, the people keep drawing my eye, as the blossoms are too far off to be the sunject. But 3 & 4 are what I would say are iconic DC cherry blossom photos.

ammdigital: now your edits are clearly a taste matter here. me, for example, consider them strongly overprocessed and unnatural.

osh_sekta wrote in post #15840680
ammdigital: now your edits are clearly a taste matter here. . . .

As are most things, but the OP wanted to know how to make these photos stand out more, so I was giving him one way of doing that - not necessarily how I would process it.

I do not mind your critique, however, being you took the time to do so, how about answering the OPs question: "Please give advice on how to make these stand out a bit better." I'm interested to know as I, like many others here, are wanting to learn & improve our skills with the advice given here.

Played around with it in PS.... Pulled some of the blue out by using the color balance tool to shift it away from blue and more toward red and yellow. Used dodge, burn and saturate tools at 5% to tweak little bits and pieces. Made the trees a bit pinker. Used the shadows/highlights tool to pull the brightness out of the sky. Maybe over processed.... I dunno. I really like this image though. So pretty! Good composition Thinking you might have great success with these and the HDR processing.