Did I do it? I think I did it – mouseover – voila! Before, after! Fab.
So, how did I get from the before to the after? Luckily, it’s Touch Up Tuesday, so here it goes:
From the before image above, I fixed the exposure in ACR –
Then, I started piling on the textures:
First, I duplicated the background, and then I applied a black to white gradient map, at normal blending mode, 100%. I then added a layer mask, and brushed the black and white off the leaf.
Then, I duplicated the background again, popped it on top, at Soft Light blending mode, 100%.
Now the image looked like this:
At this point, I thought it looked really wintery, and I wanted to keep that fall feel. So, I picked textures that I knew would warm the image up, and give it drama.
So, I then added Kim Klassen’s Light Paper texture, at Color Burn at 40%. That really made the leaf pop, giving it that red color. Now, I was pretty happy with the color of the foliage, but not with the washed out sky. I added Kim’s Warm Grunge Texture at Multiply, 40%, which gave the sky a cloudy coffee like texture. And, to finish it off, I added Kim’s Warm Palette texture at Soft Light 100%, and that just made the image glow.
That’s it! Easy peasy!
And, for a tutorial on how to do the mouseover affect, check this out! For those of you who use Flickr, you can skip the part of the tutorial about creating posts just to get URL’s. Just go to your image in Flickr, and click on Share. Under Share, go to grab the HTML code – you don’t need to grab the entire code – just grab the part that starts with farm5.static, and ends with jpeg. For instance, the code for one of these images was http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/5182611089_1370bb585e.jpg — just plug that code into Shadowhouse Creations’ script, and you’ll be good to go!
