Making Wallpaper with Blossom

[wulf]

Here is an image I took on Saturday, looking up at the sky through blossom on a cherry tree:



I was quite pleased with the result but wanted to crop it for use as desktop wallpaper and also make it more vivid:



Stages:

1. Cropping: I set the crop tool on The Gimp to a 4:3 ratio and experimented with different options. I found one that was near to 2400x1800, a nice, round pair of numbers, so pushed the settings to that and looked all the way round the border before committing to the crop. I used the rule of thirds to make the most of the most sharply focused bunch of blossom (top right intersection) and also avoided including any of the blossom in the top left corner (so as not to distract from the dark framing).

2. I decided to add a subtle vignette effect. I added a black layer and erased the centre with a very large, soft-edged brush. I set this to overlay mode and reduced the opacity. I also created a duplicate of this layer, blurred it even more, set it to normal mode and reduced the opacity so it was barely visible.

3. Back to the photo, I created a duplicate layer and made subtle adjustments to the curves tool. This made the colours richer and cleaner (although, as with the vignette, subtlety was the watchword).

4. I created a couple of duplicates of this new layer to apply a high pass sharpening effect (set the top layer to grain extract mode, blur, merge to the layer below and then set that to overlay mode). I repeated this with a different radius blur on another pair of copies from the same source layer and then experimented with blending the effect together.

5. Final tweaks on the opacity of different layers to get the effect I wanted and then I flattened, saved and published the image.

Wulf