Grand Haven Light - Looking Inland

It's been a few years since I've been to the Grand Haven Lighthouse.  And wow, there have been some changes.  Most notably a lot of the old iron was removed and the jetty was resurfaced.  As to the old iron, this was a structure connecting the lighthouse and the back light.  It was eye-sore beautiful.  The resurfaced jetty or walkway from shore was just great.  Sure, I like worn structures but this new look was great.
During my visit, there wasn't much action going on.  No waves.  Lots of people getting a nice autumn walk in.  In a few weeks, this area won't be as pleasant.  Too bad it's so far away, at some point I'll want wave action!
I usually don't like to have people in my photographs.  Today was a bit different in that there were people fishing and they looked to be part of the scenery.  To me they are interesting, not eye distracting.
In the original image, there were two couples at the base of the light that I need to remove.  If I was going to leave people in the shot, why remove them?  Well, I always like a good challenge.  And they were also catching my eye.  One person had on a lime green coat that just didn't look right against the red light.  Off to the side, OK.  Not so much where they were.
I would have liked more color in the trees and I really thought this time of year the colors would have exploded.  But they are as they are.
This photo, from concept to post processing was an interesting journey.  On site, there was sun at my back, there was some color in the trees and there was a great sky/cloud pattern.  What's not to like?  The dynamic contrast of my eye exceeded that of the camera.  The sun shining on the red light and the white objects just off the beach were pretty much blown.  The fix is exposure compensation.  For this image, I dialed in a -1 or under-exposed by one stop.  That gives the original image a very dark look.

This definitely was not what I saw that afternoon.  And this is why we shoot RAW.  Recovering from a underexposed shot like this is not much of a challenge.  As long as there is color information on a pixel, the image can be processed.  When in doubt, shoot dark.
The challenge was I did not want a universal sunlight effect.  The sky/clouds still needs to be somewhat dark.  Additional sunlight on the red light would be too much.  Just wanted to highlight the trees, and if there was some golden color, get it to come out.
For targeted work like this, I use On One.  All the universal work and object removal was done with Photoshop.
I joke with my photo club that I don't like to take more than five minutes on any shot.  This was fun.  I worked on it for over two days, on and off.  Not that the final image is multiple hours of work, but I did bits and pieces - deleted and started over again and did bits and pieces and deleted and...  you get the idea.
Once I had everything worked out, start to finish was probably ten minutes.  One of the time contributors was an error on my part.  This was taken with the D500 on the first day.  I missed the setting to compress (lossless) the RAW file.  This file is huge and it does add some time for each process.  Quoting HJS, "DOH!"

ISO 100, f/6.3, 1/800 sec, 36 mm (EC -1)

NIKON D500 Ver.1.15/18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6

That's a lot closer to what I saw.  The trick is to not overdo the highlights.  You can make it look very fake, very quickly.  Which I did a few times.