tree

Sometimes my commute home takes twice as long as I stop and take pictures. Yesterday was no exception as the combination of the sky, clouds and the emerging spring greenery beckoned me more than once to stop the car.

The straight out of camera was just dull and flat. Not nearly what I saw visually with the naked eye. So after adjusting the white balance down from blue to more green in Gimp I then went to work in photoshop.

I first brightened the whole image. Then selected the blues in the sky and copied the results into their own sky layer. From there I adjusted the blue until it was vibrant.

As a result of brightening the foreground grass was blown out. To fix I color selected browns from the foreground and copied into a new layer. This layer I darkened. In actuality there are three different exposures in this image. Probably not technically correct, but that’s the result.

A little background on the tree, it’s been one of my favorite vistas on my drive home between Murdock and Elmwood for many years. I’ve often wanted to stop and take a picture against the ever changing Nebraska sky. Now I have an excuse. My goal is to take regular images as the seasons and weather changes, then stitch them together in a time lapse fashion to represent a yearly “life of a tree”.

Has anyone attempted something like this? If so I’d love to see the result.

Related articles

• How to Use Photoshop Curves to Correct Exposure and Colour (oxfordschoolofphotography.wordpress.com)
• 5 Top Tips for Working with Gimp (digital-photography-school.com)
• Create a Scenic Landscape Composition in Photoshop (clixto7.com)