I thought it would be fun to turn the sand into snow! Here's what I came up with:
Here's what I did (in GIMP):
- Major adjustments to the curves to bring out the contrast
- Applied a custom gradient map to colourise the sand and turn it to ice
- Cropped the original to remove some of the bottom detail
- Added a new layer with the clouds on it (from
this picture)
- Applied the 'Oilify' filter to make the clouds more in keeping with the foreground
- Tidied up the mask to make as convincing job as possible
- Took a copy of the foreground layer and applied it in 'Burn' mode with 27% opacity
- Merged all layers
- Applied a gausian blur
- Added some lens flare
- Added a border
Phew!