[janoskiss (Steve H)]

These photos were taken from Mt Samaria state park, from a lookout spot facing roughly SE. I believe it's of the snowy peaks of Mt Buller. You can see some man made structures in the photos. If you've ever been there you might recognise them.

The first four images are the same photo with different processing, taken by holding one ocular of a Pentax PCF 8x40 binocular up to the eyepiece of a compact digital camera Fuji A350 (over 20x zoom). The last image shows the best the camera could do with its digital + optical zoom for the same scene (about 12x zoom) - without the bino in front of the lens.

The first image is basically unprocessed. The 2nd and 3rd images are the same photo with RGB levels adjusted differently. I like the contrast of the mountain best in the 2nd image, but the colours are much more natural in the 3rd image. So what I'd like is the contrast of image 2 combined with the colours of image 3. Can anyone tell me how to do this?

I tried decomposing the images into hue, value and saturation and recombining these in different ways. The best I could do is a combination of value from image 2 + hue and saturation from image 3. But the result shown in image 4 is less pleasing than either 2 or 3.