What happened to the colour?

The tops of the trees of the first image look desaturated; why?

http://i41.tinypic.com/29kw18x.jpg

http://i44.tinypic.com/1052zih.jpg

From the exif data the top photo had a greater exposure than the bottom one, this may have caused the sky and the tops of the trees to be a bit blown. Due to the fact that both the tops of the trees and the sky have colour problems, green and purple, this may have been introduced in PP with your effort to produce a reasonable shot, particularly if this shot was originally taken in Jpeg, Raw is a lot more forgiving.

Cheers. They was both shot in RAW and the top one you are right is a processing fault. It was severely underexposed because it went dark all of a sudden but using ACR I could increase fill light and it must have been there it got blown.
Trouble is these processing applications are just too good and I end up doing all the pics rather than choose the best. :)

Maybe you can process the picture twice.
First concentrate on the lower part of the image to get everything correct.
Second one you adjust the sky as good as possible.
In Photoshop merge them together using a layer mask and use only the best parts form both pictures.
This will improve the final image.

cheers; I noticed it was dark at the time and took another about 20 seconds later when it was more than ten times brighter. Then I did a spot of lens cleaning because some drops of water got on it and took another. No shortage of choice as usual. :)

Nice photo, Steve. At this time of year in Nova Scotia, a lot of the older trees look like that as either the new growth makes things look sparse and darker at the top, or some of the branches have died over the winter and have no green to show. This is not likely helpful but thought I'd give it a shot:)

Myra

cheers Myra