Of course not all images take as much work to edit as some I've shared recently.
For instance, this image was pretty simple. The raw image above is the unedited image straight from the camera without auto-processing. Two things jump out. First was that not everything was in focus, even with a rather small aperture, given the huge depth of field in this image. So I focus stacked: I combined 7 photos, focused incrementally from the front to the back, choosing the sharpest portion of each image. The second problem was how blue the photos were. It really _was_ that blue, being primarily lit by the very blue sky. But our eyes compensate for the color of the light, so in a small print it looks wrong. I warmed up the image ... but not all the way so I could keep contrast I remembered: the warm dappled light and cold blue shadows.
After adding some global tonal corrections to help mute the bright patches of sun, I was at the image above, "global edits only" image.
But the highlights - and especially the water - was still too blue, and the patches of sun were still too bright. So in the local edits I warmed just the brightest tones, and also darkened the sunny patches. After a few other tweaks, it was done: The final nature print!
The last image below is the camera's auto-edit. In addition to the areas out of focus, the waterfall is a teal color, and the surrounding areas are too bright, taking focus away from the falls and secondarily the dappled light.
Thanks for reading!