Some folk think that any post-processing of a photo is heresy, anything except "straight-out-of-camera" (SOOC) is invalid. I'm not one of those people. Now, I'm not opposed to SOOC, and I agree that we (photographers) should strive to get the best possible image on the front end. But... things like crop, rotate, exposure tweaks, burn/dodge, adjust contrast? I was doing all those things in a wet darkroom 40+ years ago. I've always liked Ansel Adams' quote: "The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance."
Now, all that is fine and dandy, but generally, the processing we're talking about is usually limited to the kinds of things I noted above (crop, rotate, exposure tweaks, burn/dodge). That's not what we have here. If Ansel Adams was talking about a symphony, this is free-form improvisation Jazz.
The original photo (see below) is quite dull. I was trying to get a sense of layers, and the pt-quite-yet aspect of spring on this cool morning. The light was a bit harsh, the colors were a bit flat, my expectations were a bit low. But I had a bit of a struggle finding this spot, and felt the need to try for a photo. And I hoped that I could make something interesting with it.
Perhaps surprisingly, there's no crop or rotate or even exposure adjustment here. I skipped the "normal" tweaks and went straight to the hard-stuff. Now, I said it was Jazz, which means it's all improvised. And not documented. But my workflow was something like: New Layer: Topaz Simplify to soften some of the harshness, and boost the colors a bit (significant tweaks from defaults). Blend that layer with base. Merge, then copy new layer. Topaz Impressions on that layer, don't remember exact preset. Resize for display size, then addtexture in Photoshop Elements. Fram effect was manually added in Elements, there's 6 or 7 steps in that..
Here's the original:
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