The Photo your eye saw but camera didn't

[sallybode]

I used many masks in making this more compelling. Many times we expect that the color we see will be what we get when we take pictures. However light cast across the lens can wash out an otherwise pretty picture. Then again, it could have been the camera, not all digital pictures come up to standard.

The clouds are done from some of the cloud textures in the supplied textures with PhotoPaint. I often use these same textures in DRAW when I have to do a vignette portrait for a funeral folder where I work.

The clouds are more interesting when used with a mask because you can fade them out to a more natural appearance and stetch them with the edit handles to where they look quite natural.

Still and all it is amazing the amount of hidden detail that even bad pictures have given a good correction.

One of my favorite ways to lighten a picture is to duplicate the original and use the screen blend mode. Sometimes, I use several layers of screen mode as their effect adds to gain the strength of the effect. Once I like what I have gotten, I merge these layers together. In the process some areas become too light and have to be brought back from the original photo. This picture, I split in half and worked on the top half and the bottom almost forgetting about the whole until the end and then put them back together. In landscape photography, you have foreground, mid ground, background and sky and depending upon the depth of field, more stages in between. So there was a lot of adjusting here.

The picture of the butte did not need as much retouching, just a better sky and bringing some more realistic color to the fire-red buttes.