I actually got to sit down for a bit and play today. This was a shot of an abandoned marsh house near East Point lighthouse. The sky was blah but i liked the angle and deterioration. I desaturated and then toned to a sepia. Added a new layer with cloud filter in PS and then erased the bottom half. I applied a plastic wrap filter to the image and then cropped off the top and bottom. It almost seems to have an embossed effect to it. It's sure different than what I started with :D. All thoughts are always appreciated.
I really like your technique and you're right...at first glance I thought it was the embossed filter and not the plastic wrap.
One thing about the image is that it's all more or less in the mid-tone range. Maybe darken the roof and lighten that white area on the right side a bit to give the image more depth?
Julie, Your advice sounds right on so I re-visiited the file and made the changes and tried not to overdo it. Does this present better, or does it need more.?
Dave, I played with it a bit as well. I selected the BG of the sky and lightened it a bit using a levels adjustment. Next I inversed the selection (catching the grass area) and darkened it a bit, again, using a levels adjustment. I put a light effect (filter/render/light effect) right behind the roof of the house so the sky had a bit more "glow" to it. I then ran a "paint with light' action which lets you use your brush tool to selectively lighten or darken a specific area by painting over it. I lightened the side of the house a bit and darkened the roof.
Now...that's not to say your image isn't very cool. Yours has the embossed look we were talking about and I do think the revision is better - you definitely got more depth. I try to see my color images as black and white's - what would be the lightest areas? What would be the darkest? That's why I went in and added different tones to different areas. Now it has a different feel - doesn't make it better - just different - but I wanted you to see how far you could go if you wanted to create different areas of light and dark.
Oh, yeah, I also cropped a bit off the left side but again, it's just to show you something different. I think I actually prefer your crop better.
Really cool stuff Julie. Maybe you can teach an old dog a new trick after all :D. I like both versions for different reasons, and I appreciate the time you've spent to help me grow. I see that you also rotated the image a bit which also gives a different feel. There's just so many different directions that you can go these days. Thanks so much for the guidance.