Took a few (and rather dull) pictures today since it's going to freeze this weekend and more then likely kill all the colorful foilage. Thought I would see what I could do to make them better and concocted this sky blue difference technique (not going to work if the sky is complete blown of course) contrast mask effect for faking a polarizer. Thought I would share this result. May share an XCF later (will reduce the size to keep the size small). For now, I hope you like.

Click here for original (not going to have Tux host an over 2MByte file).

Lyle,

That's beautiful! I'm actually jealous! I was playing with a photo at work and I just can't get my sky to pop.=( But your sky is simply fantastic not to mention the making the colors so vivid on the trees!

Wunderbar!!

I even +1 this .. I think this photo is great!!!!

I agree.That is a beautiful photo Lyle.
Thanks for sharing it.

I wish my backyard looked like that.

Thanks MrBiggz/Rod (you nija'd me; lol). I'm going to attached the XCF (reduced sized and zipped) so you can sort of see the steps via the layer properties. Way too lazy to create a tut. lol

As you can see from the original photo (sooc), it's sort of dull. You might recognize the cotton field though; they just picked the cotton a few days ago; quite late for sure, but the cotton was bumper. The trees do really look richer then what my camera saw, but, of course, not as rich as my hyper version is. lol

As a side note, I posted other ones using a similar technique here and here.

I gave this a try! Although my photos wasn't as nice as Lyle's I tried to make it work!

This is the original


This is with a contrast mask applied


I wish I could make my sky pop like Lyle's. There wasn't much or any clouds in the sky. I tried to make my sky pop .. it was more like snapping your fingers while their coated with motor oil. Bah! Here it is!


FYI: This is Veterans Memorial Plaza in downtown Indy

Lyle You've done a good job with the sky nice work.

Mrbiggz your's is just as nice too

Real nice capture NB. Used G'MIC's Fast Tonemapping among many things for this one (didn't use anything that I used for the ones I processed earlier; lol). Image is a little too small to do more detail work, but also did some selective Wavelet Denoise for the sky. I like the solid blue sky; no real need for clouds here.

Thanks all!

I resized down didn't want to bloat anybodies bandwidth! The full size did have a lot more detail. I didn't save it though. Was just a practice run. Still very interesting the different variations!

lyle I thought you done a bit of smudging with the clouds but I was wrong

I rarely smudge Lorri (except to do cleanup like work); way too lazy to do that especially with a mouse. lol

I love smudge, Lyle you need some Geritol.

Lyle,

I was looking at your xcf file (still) and I can under stand the it from the bottom background layer right up to the background copy#2 layer. After that ya lost me!

Where did you get the first 'visible' layer? Is that from merging all the visible layers from the Background to Background copy#2? I'm just not seeing it!!

How you can str8n me out Lyle!

The first visible layer is with all layers below enabled. I then disabled layers no longer needed. I don't usually do it this way, but did so to document what I did instead of create a procedure since I am lazy. lol

From there I set that result to Overlay and created the next visable layer which I set to darken. I then go back to the overlay layer and duplicate til happy.