I did slightly more post-processing on this image than usual, so I thought it might be interesting to upload the original photo and describe what I did.
As you can see, the original is low contrast, has an ugly blue cast and lacks any sort of punch. But I thought the wind-scoured foreground had potential, so I set about trying to exploit that.
I started off by applying my usual adjustments in Photoshop: a tweak of the levels and midtone contrast using curves, a curve in the blue channel to get rid of the blue cast and a slight boost of saturation.
After that I darkened the sky, added a subtle vignette and placed a black fill layer on top of the image. I changed the blending mode of this layer to Hue and decreased the opacity to about 40%. This washed out some of the colour, increased the contrast and gave the light a harsher quality.
Finally I selectively sharpened (it’s slightly sharper than I normally go) and cropped from the top and bottom.
I was quite happy with the result – hopefully it’s an improvement, but let me know what you think. Hope you have a good weekend and thanks for visiting!
Oh, the picture was taken in the Cairngorms, Scotland, in February 2006.