Montana Landscape

[larsjames]

Stillwater River (!), Beartooth Mountains, South Central Montana, USA.
Original and "massaged" images.
PS CS4 tone, color and sharpness corrections plus BUZZ Simplifier plug-in for painterly effect.

[Dave Humphries]

Very nice Lars

[joec]

Amazing what the post-processing can do. How long did the manipulations take?

Joe

[larsjames]

joec:

I spent about 10 minutes making corrections, but after working in PS for 20 years I have a lot of experience to efficiently resolve most problems.

On this image it was easy to reveal shadow detail: (Image menu > Adjustments > Shadow / Highlights).

I used various selection tools to carefully select the highlights (water and sky areas) and then copied those selections to a new layer. I set the Blending Mode for the new layer to Multiply, which I've found works wonders for pumping up even minimal highlight detail.

[CNelson]

Nice work Lars. I do like the painterly effect and use it frequently.

Chuck

[kevinbythebeach]

nice pics