I took a pass at this photo as well. Mine is the image on the top. SG's is the one on the bottom. I show them next to each other because I wanted to get a better look at how we approached the image differently.
I wanted to see the color of the trees stand out a bit more, so I white balanced toward yellow a little bit. I also desaturated some of the blues to let the reds and yellows in the building pop a bit more. Lastly, using Lightroom, I exposed the highlights, lights, darks and shadows each separately to achieve a bit more dynamic range, but not to the extent that I am clipping the highlights or shadows. I much preferred SG's crop, and did something quite similar. Oh... and I used a noise reduction pass that ends up making the whole image look more painterly, with a little loss of detail.
I'm not presenting my image as better than SG's. I was mostly just curious to see them side by side. Both images feel a bit overworked, to my eye, which is probably why they evoke postcards. Once you start selectively desaturating and saturating, you have entered the realm of photo-illustration, imo.
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