Trouble with colo(u)r effects...

[hyakuhei]

Hi All,

I took this picture a while back:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyakuhei/173546964/
[full size] http://farm1.static.flickr.com/69/173546964_6007571f9b_b.jpg

Today I started playing with the image, I cropped it and colorized to give an effect that I quite like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyakuhei/548262626/
[full size] http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1116/548262626_15e3b8d5d5_b.jpg

The problem is that I'd like the sun rays to be a little more pronounced. I can't really think of a good way of doing this. Any ideas ?

I'm also quite interested in the general idea of selectively playing with colours for clouds etc, any suggestions on where I could look ?

 

[tataencu]

i assume that you used "desaturate" to turn your picture B&W.
that is not the best method. If you are using Adobe Photoshop you have an option called "Black&White" in Image > Adjustments. There you can play with all the colour channels as you like and turn it in a B&W image with a lot more tweaking given to you.

And if you want to make only the rays colorful (like everything else B&W except some of the center rays), you can duplicate the layers, fully desaturate the lower layer and then play with the blending mode and opacity of the layer above.

That is all i can think of at the moment. Hope it helps.


Oh, remebered...you could always use masks, but they might prove a little tricky...

 

[hyakuhei]

Ah I didn't B&W using the desaturate but your advice still looks extremely useful. Thanks

 

[The_Traveler]

Read chapter 12 of Katrin Eismann's Masking & Compositing.

 

[WDodd]

It kind of bothers me that the horizon is not straight. Might me something that you could fix by cropping.

 

[hyakuhei]

Yeah my girlfriend pointed that out. I'll have a play with that tonight but its a pretty low res pic and I don't think there will be enough left if I cropped around the landscape...