A wetlands marsh area behind my house. It was sunrise and i have always liked the textures on these trees at dawn and dusk, but never stopped to take a picture. This was originally intended for the "Trees II" challenge but I decided against entering as I anticipate it would get lost in the rather large challenge.
Editing Steps:
Tonemap of single RAW image (I tried HDR of three images but my tripod was not well placed and I had a bit of bounce and could not easily line up the images).
Adjustment layers for curves, brightness/contrast, B/W converstion using Hue/Saturation with single channel adjustments. Added duplicate layer, and burned and dodged extensively in the background and on the textures, blur brush on background to remove a bit of pixelation from the single image tonemapping, resized to 1320pixel, normal sharpen 1X, resize for web to 660 pixel (Adamus Sharpening), added border, applied very subtle noise ninja for contrast and smoothing background. Done.
The more I think about this, the more I think you shouldn't mess with it in Topaz... as it stands now, it has a nice film-ish feel to it. I do think Topaz is very digital in feel.
Oh, I do like this. It's very quiet, very dignified. Has a nice strength to it. And this would have scored very well with me in the Trees challenge, though I can't guarantee how it would have fared with the masses. It very much is about trees. Now that you have that nifty Topaz thing, try doing this one with either Portrait Drama or Crispy and take it down a notch, then convert to B&W. You may have to add a touch of shadow highlight, but watch for the noise, which is one of the downsides of Topaz. Gorgeous light this time of day.
Very nice! Next time that happens.. tripod bounce.. try taking one of your best images and create 7 exposures in PS, save and generate your HDR. It works great!
Peter, this looks really great...I would really like to learn more about the dodge/burn tools...your application looks really great...thanks for the PP notes too...
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