I'm always taken by images of water, and in this case reflections in the water. Out of the camera, this one didn't really do it for me. But flip it around and clean it up, and it almost has a Monet-like impressionist flavor to it.
While I'm still feeling my way through photo editing, here's what I did to create the image. Or...
Adjusting color, contrast, shadow and highlight detail in Photoshop Elements 9.
This is the original photo (click on it for a bigger view) - I took a shot of the trees and bushes reflected in a small pond. The edge of the pond is at the very top of the photo, everything below is reflection in the water.
By itself, nothing special. But the way the reflection changes with the ripples in the water caught my eye.
Open the image in Photoshop Elements.
First, I inverted the image so the trees looked right side up again, and then cropped it.
I cut off the top of the image to remove some of the drab brown leaves and branches, and cropped the bottom to leave just enough to mark the edge of the water.
In my new impressionist view, the "pond" is defined by the grasses at the water edge along the bottom, and by a line a third of the way up where the rippling changes. Everything above that is my new landscape, everything below is reflection.
The image is pretty washed out. I can improve the that by creating a levels adjustment layer (Layer / New Adjustment Layer / Levels). Take a look at the histogram, it's shifted to the right - toward white. Move the black point slider to the right (I moved it from 0 to 53) to meet the point where the histogram begins.
Much better contrast now, with some of the areas black instead of that washed out gray.
Next, I created another adjustment layer to punch up the colors - it was a shallow brown pond so didn't fully reflect the greens and reds in the leaves.
Layer / New Adjustment Layer / Hue and Saturation.
I increased the saturation at the master level, and then again with the blues to bring out the color in the sky.
The image still seemed a little flat. Changing the levels of shadows and highlights helped:
Click on the background layer, then Enhance / Adjust Lighting / Shadows and Highlights. Move the "Lighten Shadows" and "Darken Highlights" until the lighting looks better.
You can play with the image some more - adjusting brightness or adding a little blur to make it look more like brush strokes - but I thought it looked pretty good at this point.
What do you think? Is there a better way, short of breaking out my oil paints and easel?
