Frontenac Park

[foxor]

There was a cool place on a recent hike I went on, where a very thin, tall bit of land separated two separate lakes. This panorama is five pictures stitched together to try to illustrate this.



The five original images can be found here:
Frontenac Park - a set on Flickr

How I got to the "after" shot:

Arranged them together, used free transform to tweak the perspective a tiny bit to try to get each image to align a bit better. Used the eraser with 0% hardness to blur the seams between the images. Easy enough on the first three seams, but the seam between the 4th and 5th image was definitely tricky!

To enhance the sky:
-The left hand side just needed decreased brightness and increased contrast/saturation...and I also created a background duplicate image, used a layer mask to isolate the sky, decreased the layer's opacity, and set the blending mode to 'multiply'
-The right hand side was completely blown out. Creating a mask with all those branches in the way would have been impossible, so I copied the whole image to a new file, used the "black and white" adjustment tool, and dragged the sliders for all colours down to black so that only the blown out parts remained. Inverted it (so white becomes black/black becomes white). Copied this image into the mask on a new layer in my original image. Painted some blue and grey (sampled from the left hand part of the sky) onto this layer in the right hand (blown out) portion of the sky (and a tiny bit in the water, just so it all matched), set the blending mode to "colour" and reduced opacity to about 40%

On the whole image:
-Adjusted the levels
-Created a black and white adjustment layer and set the blending mode to soft light. Reduced the opacity a bit.
-Created another adjustment layer with increased brightness and contrast, using the layer mask, hid this from all except the tree trunks and a few other areas that needed to 'pop' a bit

That's about it really! Comments/suggestions welcome!