(Oldschool?) Saturated Tree in Autumn

Hey everyone, I had this picture of a nice fall tree, which was very difficult to work with - it was very dark, soft, the trunk had all sorts of red and blue and green aberration all over it, there was a distracting object in the corner, the sky was very noisy, the whole image infact.

So I tweaked and blurred and saturated and desaturated and colored and contrasted and so on...I can't seem to get it sharper without making it look cruddy, so I aimed, colorwise and sharpness wise for maybe, what is, to me at least, a sort of oldschool, saturated film look. It does remind me of maybe some oldschool nature photography I've seen. I really like the shape of this tree, and PS'ed it tons to improve the dark original. It may not look tops at a large print/view due to the inherent noisiness, and the fact that due either to my settings or skills that morning, or this cameras built in lens's sometimes lacking ability to pick up far off detail, but I tried!

I hope y'all dig it. And any suggestions or steps for edits, or edits, comments, CC, are all welcome. Thanks for looking, etc., and enjoy.

R.ticle One

I hope you still have the original. I'm not very expert at this, but try downloading the free version of NeatImage and use that to reduce the noise, before doing anything else. It looks to me as though you have selected the tree and done some adjustments which have left a halo around it. Perhaps using the magic wand tool to do the selection might help avoid that. I tried it with your image with the tolerance set to 75, anti alias on, contiguous off. I selected the orange leaves and worked on them first, using levels, saturation and contrast, and then selected the bark and used contrast and saturation.

I think there are some great colors in there. And grain is not necessarily bad. but the halo around the tree (espacially at the top where the darker blue sky is) was the first thing I noticed. I would keep grain over that.

Nice shot, tho'. You're right, the tree has a nice shape!

Thank you both for your help so far! I've gotta go out for a bit/while, as a quick and dirty fix, I used selective coloring to make the rest of the sky's tone match the halo - but does it make it look too watery/washed out, or do you think that some careful saturation could fix it up after this step?

I have the original, but when I think how many steps which I don't fully remember and how much manual correction I went through to get it...ughh...

Is there a way for Photoshop CS to remember every step you took and save them with a file? Actions or something? Sorry, still a day and a half newbie user here. Thanks again. Here's the quick fix.

R.ticle One

What I did, didn't take very many steps at all. Sounds like you tried a lot of things and lost track. Your re-do could use some contrast. When I get frustrated with an image, I go make a cup of fresh brew coffee, take a break, come back to it later and start over.

Elisabeth-Ann, thanks for your encouragement. I've been working on it, and have at least reduced the halo a great deal. I don't think I've mastered the magic wand, but am learning - PS CS2 is a very powerful photo tool as I'm discovering! I've got those colors to pop a bit more like your sample, which I really appreciate.

R.ticle One

You are most welcome, glad I could help