Processing the images from the camera to fine tune the brightness, contrast and color balance, but I fancied playing around to inject a little hyperreality with some moody color casts and epic lens flares to subtly enhance the photo.
Often when post-processing a photograph the aim is to carefully fine tune the levels and colour balance to capture the real life scene, but sometimes it's worth taking the edits a little further to enhance an image with hyper realistic effects. Applying colour casts, increasing the contrast and adding lighting effects can give an image an intense mood just like we see in magazines or on billboards.
Changing the blending mode of the Gradient Map to Overlay to allow the new colours to interact and alter the tones of the original image, generating a subtle colour cast. And droppin the opacity to lower the contrast to add the full impact of the effect.
A past time would be editing, already edited photos for a more hyper-aware colored and light balanced photo. Some images can take multiple layers of contrast to add a moody compostite. Or a surreal, etheral approach...it depends on your mood and what you want to photograph to say. But here is a simple way, into how you can enhance your photo with color & lighing.