Joe Sharrow’s original photo of an overflowing Rappahannock River looked quite blah in the color version (brown water and overcast skies), so he decided to convert the image to black-and-white and add a yellow/blue split tone.
We think monochrome was the right move, but we found his strong toning a little hard on the retinas. So, working from his original RAW file, we converted to b&w in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, added contrast with the Structure slider, and darkened the sky using a control point. We cropped in slightly from the left for a little less tree clutter, and split-toned it yellow and blue—very mildly in this case.
Total time fixing: 15 minutes.