Someone recently stated that a lot of people doing digital images go way too far, of course they were nice enough to say I wasn’t one of them, but I feel I should confess that I have been in the past, take a look at this image.

At the time I did this, I thought it was great.  I even had it printed and put it into a show last year.  This image was featured in a blog post in June 2011. It is an interesting post, it was at a time when I felt I didn’t know enough about Photoshop and I was trying to teach myself how to use it.  I think I’ve come a long way since then.

When I read the comment about digital images, I thought it would be fun to go right back and see what it would look like now if I was doing it.  Would I change much, or would I leave it pretty much as it was.

This time it was opened in Camera Raw and processed.  Camera Raw is a great editing tool, I don’t think I could live without it now.  You can do some amazing things in it that you just can’t do in Photoshop, or other editing software.  Though I should state that Camera Raw is part of Photoshop CS6.

When I processed it this time I wanted the moody sky to determine the atmosphere of the image.  Toning down the red of the dirt was also important, the trees were to become the focus of the image.  Some gradient was also added to darken the sky more and tone down some of the foreground.

The rework is much more natural looking, though it still has a surreal quality about it.  Of course, you knew I would use Color Efex and Silver Efex as well, I had to see what I could do in them.  Color Efex first.

This filter is called Monday Morning.  I am not really sure about it, according to the list it is for weddings, so maybe it would look better for people, I should try that.  I do like what it has done to the tree, and I don’t mind the overall effect, but perhaps Silver Efex would be better.

I do like this.  I really like the atmosphere and the mood that has been created.  The Low Key preset was used for this and the Lens Fall Off 2 Vignetting was used.  It’s interesting to see how the focus really is on the tree and the sky behind.

Which do you prefer?  I was thinking today how long it takes me to work on images sometimes, meaning, that I will do it at one time, then go back and rework it, and I know there are images that I have reworked that I will rework another time.  I suppose it is like a painter reworking a painting, sometimes it is hard to know when you are finished, or if you ever will be.

The weekend is here, and hopefully the hot weather has gone.  It hasn’t been as hot here today, but it has been very humid, I think I prefer the heat.  Humidity is fairly recent here, with what is happening to the planet we are noticing more and more humid summers.

I have plans to get out with the Nikon D5100 to take heaps of photos, I really want to see what I can do with it.  Fun weekend for me, I hope you will have a good one too.