Project: Mt. Baker

The other day on the drive home from visiting our new home that is currently under construction, I stopped on the roadside to take a few snapshots of this scene of Mt. Baker. Dave had showed me a quick way to blend two exposures together which I knew I needed to do to capture all of the detail of this scene. The result of blending the exposures was disappointing but I was determined to re-create the mood that my eyes had seen which my camera clearly could not. I ended up with a painterly effect which works perfectly for me. I did not use any Artistic or Brush Stroke filters to achieve this effect. What you see is a result of five some odd hours of experimentation and tweaking of Curves, Levels, Saturation and Hues as well as Noise Reduction and a final Diffuse layer to mute the white halos or glowing edges. Hope you like it (you may want to go fullscreen [F11] to view the large images as the gallery doesn’t have scrollbars).