Highly processed landscape

[dlanter]

Some of you may have seen a different version of this shot from a recent post of mine after a trip to AR. I liked parts of the original shot, but there was a lot wrong with it, so I just started tearing it apart.

First, this version is highly cropped to get rid of everything but the most colorful parts of the shot. Second, the plain sky was replaced with the clouds using a layer mask. I should have done some work on that part because the separation between tree & sky is too distinct. Next I bumped up the saturation and contrast quite a bit to help separate the colors. After the heavy cropping, a lot of the leave details was lost, so using some artistic filter plugins, I applied the watercolor filter with a fairly heavy brush stroke setting.

Then finally I ran the whole thing through AlienSkin's Blowup plugin to resize it to 12 x 24 and had it printed at WHCC. It arrived yesterday and is now mounted in a black wooden frame similar to the shot below. I think it came out pretty good. What do you think?