Photoshop magic

hello everyone.  i have come up with a sort of tutorial, or should i say me meandering through a project with little extras to show you guys some of the capabilities of photoshop.  this is not a detailed point by point tutorial....maybe this isn't even a tutorial at all, oh dear.  but rather, oh why must i rattle on??       ok, you remember the lovely picture of the little log cabin in the post before.  it had lots of potential, right??  well the first thing i did was bring the raw format of the picture into photoshop. 

raw file format is absolutely amazing, you can really control everything about the image your working with.  i felt this picture was flat, the colors, so i decided to go in and change them a bit.  so this is me a little further along in the process.

the change of color, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation is very apparent.  i just kept messing with it until i liked how it looked.  i have a tendency to go with very bright and contrasty pictures when i'm done with them, some say the mark of an amateur, but of course i beg to differ.  anyways, with the changes i made i would say it could stop here and be a beautiful photograph.  

the top left hand corner bothers me, i tried to adjust it as much as i could get away with, but for now it has to due.  next i decided to crop the image to add interest and excitement to it, well as much excitement as you can to an old log cabin.  like my little joke? 

boy i wish i had a wide angle lens, but that is another discussion.  now that it's cropped it looks much more interesting as in not so much dead space.  now it really can be done.  but something else to think about....if you want to crop a picture in some weird dramatic dimensions, remember, if you plan on framing it things might get difficult.  now i had another picture i really liked, so i made all my color, brightness, etc, changes and decided that picture maybe needed a log cabin.

so this is that.  i looked up some different ideas to do this, which were all not quite what i was looking for, so i just did it the way i knew how to.  i think it turned out alright.  pretty realistic.  now for the last of me goofing off with these images i went all crazy cool.  i always go towards the blues and purples, which i have no idea why, but this is what happened.

i played around with layer masks, one of my best friends, and some paint brushes.  finally i cut out some birds from another picture and put them in here. 

so that lays this photograph for rest for awhile.  

till next time

bye