Voyage through canal mist

A big thanks to Ellen for her kind texture feature on dpreview
and a warm welcome to their visiting fans!

Once again its the time of year for my favorite misty, foggy mornings in the Mediterranean! As soon as I open my shutters and spy mist outside, I need to work fast, as the sun tends to burn it off soon after 9 am.
This time I just drove to the edge of town to our famous Canal du Midi, which connects the Atlantic on the west coast to our local oyster beds at Sete edging the French Mediterranean. This part of the canal is the last high point before the famous series of ancient locks take barges and pleasure boats down to sea level and just a few miles on to the salt water Oyster lagoons and open seas. Thus this stretch of canal is very wide for the high season boat jams, as only a few can be taken down to sea level at the same time.

One great thing I discovered this week from Flickr was how good the Camera Raw program is for getting rid of Chromatic Aberration, I tend to see it mostly on tree branches with pale skies behind at the edges of images, when pushing the image in photoshop using the CS5 HDR program these effects are multiplied tenfold and its always been a problem even with expensive lenses such as my 24-105mm canon all-rounder lens. However after sorting this out in camera raw, I can now carry on without those nasty problem effects!

The base image has already been treated in Nik Color Efex pro-4 - Contrast color range - with the slider moved towards the red end of the spectrum, this zings up the leaves and grass, helping to wake-up the images full potential.

I then thought I'd try the Painterly textures, as mist is often a drab grey colour, it needed some nice pastel warm tones to help balance the bright colour from the right hand side of the image.
When using textures on mist its a good idea not to use a hard setting like 'Overlay' as this can make your mist disappear!
So I suggest Soft Light is used on Mist;

Brushed Rose - Soft Light @ 100% Flipped Horizontally and vertically
Pantheon Stone - Soft Light @ 85%

After which, to give the image a point of focus, I used Nik Color Efex pro-4 - Darken/Lighten Center, the lightest point of interest over the line of tree trunks.

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