I have a picture that I really like. I live out in southwest Kansas and we don't have a lot of water. So, whenever I get a chance to go somewhere where there is water, I try to go take pictures. This picture is from the Kansas City area while visiting my in-laws. I thought that it was a nice picture, but needed some work to make it jump. Here is the original.
Any ideas of what I can do with this to bring out the color in the trees and reflection, but I think the sky and nonreflective water needs to be darkened. Not a master at editing, but I am wanting to learn. Here is an idea I had at least for a crop.
If I can get a nice looking picture, I want to make this a print. I have never done that and would like to try to see what it would look like.
The sky definitely needs to be bluer. Here's my quick version...
Select the sky area (wand), tweak the brightness down, slightly change hue and saturation, then I used the gothic glow action on the image and just blurred the harsh tree line a bit. Could use a little more work but if you want prints, you need a higher res image to work with for better results.
Used the magic wand, can't remember the tolerance, at 30, deselected contigous. Cut selection/new layer with sky.
From there, I just played with the hue/saturation/lightness slightly. Hue +47 sat +100 light -3 . (I am redoing this, I didn't copy my steps lol) Then, on the sky layer, I used a soft brush with around 50% flow, and cloned just the bottom of the skyline. Changed sky layer blending mode to darken.
I like this one a little better than my other one - basically the same steps as above, but I included the foreground of the water, adjusted the hue & sat. but could not go to far without ruining the water. Then I adjusted the color balance accordingly... Cloned loosely where the waters met, changed the blend mode to darken.
Here was my stab at editing your picture. I selected out the sky, then adjusted the saturation and the hue. I then inverted the selection and increased the saturation there. I then did some adjustment to lighting/shadow and boosted the contrast a little to bring out the trees. A tad unsharp mask, then cleaned up the noise a little without blurring the image too much. There was still noise, so I used the smudge tool on the sky and on the lighter part of the water.
Thank-you for offering your image. I'm still practicing on editing too, so I would appreciate comments on my attempts.
