During my latest hike in Shenandoah mountains I took this photograph (above). By looking at the image you may think that I had to do a lot of manipulations in post-processing. Strangely, not at all. The main effect (bluish background with the fall) is achieved in Camera Raw. I simply played with the image in the Camera Raw tool before actually opening it in Photoshop. You want to find out how?

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Ok. Here is what I saw when opened the image where all the settings are set to "auto":

As you see the image looks quite ordinary. No special effects yet, just a good exposure. And then I started to tweak the settings. My first step was to adjust the temperature, which I dropped significantly. The photograph started looked cold (bluish). The leaves started looked bleaker and somewhat green (instead of yellow). So I moved the Tint slider to the right, and something started to come out. The thing is that we have to find the right balance between blue (cool) background and yellow (warm) leaves.
Next steps are quite simple - correct the automatic settings, to make the background a bit darker, and the water slightly brighter, to let it stand out more.

And when I finally opened the image in Photoshop (converted from RAW) I added some vignetting and blurred the corners. Quite regular stuff, which is described in my article.

That's it. Most of the manipulations were made in Camera Raw.