Coal River - Summer becomes Autumn with Layers.

[Killakoala]

I've been wondering for a couple of months what I could do to the following image to make it look better.

Click on the image for a full size view (1000px)


It's an HDR image of five combined images of Coal River in Tasmania, showing in the distance, the Richmond Bridge.

I felt that the overall feel of the image was that there was far too much green in it.

I was playing around with it in Photoshop today and I happened upon a filter in the Nik Filter suite that I have that I have not used before. It is called Indian Summer. It very nicely converts greens into corresponding shades of brown. Problem was that rather than my image looking too green, it now looked too brown.

So I did what anyone would do. I created two layers, one as the original and one with the filter and erased some of the brown to reveal green until I was satisfied I had a good balance.

The resulting image now looks like I had shot it in Autumn. With a bit of cropping and cloning and some adjustments to contrast, the image looks much more like what I would have liked it to.

Some energy police would say this is cheating, but I feel that it isn't. It's my own artistic impression of a scene that is real. It existed at one point in time and now my memory has interpreted it differently. It's my mind and I can do that if I want.

Here is the completed image;
Click on the image for a full size view (1000px)


Comments are always welcome.

[surenj]

Nicely done...Definitely an improvement to the original. I like it... You could make another: with snow (I have seen a few tutorials on the net how to do that)

[Killakoala]

Great idea Surenj. Turn it into winter I'll give it a quick go.

Using three layers, a green, a brown and one converted to B&W Infra-red. I adjusted the opacity of the layers and did some erasing to get this. A quick saturation adjustment and resize.

Not exactly snow but a very heavy frost.

Click on the image for a full size view at 1000px

[Justin]

Ha, that last one is magical, where are the pixies?

I just feel that the first one is a little soft, the tone in the green is lovely though.

[cobby1]

Thats Awsome Mate & no i dont think it is cheating

Cheers Cobby