Venice waterways

This shot, taken on the beautiful Venice waterways with a cheap Konica Minolta digital camera a few years ago without the aid of a much needed polarizer filter in the early summer sun was left unused until now, when I had the idea of extending the sky area and changing it into a square format from a dodgy landscape.

As you can see from this image, blown out skies shouldn't be too much of a problem, if you want to go the painterly way!
When starting to rescue an image, try to start with the sky, for this reason we included several sky combination's as summer skies often have this problem. Once the blown out areas of images are sorted you can start pulling the image together with all-over texture. As ever, my only problem is knowing when to stop!
I frequently go back to click off textures, to see if the result is better, often I'll then remove a couple as I did here.
Finishing with Touchstone, my personal favorite texture, which was designed with skies in mind!

Firstly I duplicated and used a slight painterly effect.
The rest of the textures are used from the first listed to the last in CS4.

Duplicated base image - Normal @ 69% slight painterly effect with watercolour @ 10% and poster edges @ 4%
Pans Sky ~ Soft Light @ 100% (Over Sky and horizon only, brushed away from rest of image)
Pans Sky ~ Soft Light @ 100% desaturated (Over Sky and horizon only, brushed away from rest of image)
Verdigris Mist ~ Vivid Light @ 45%
Matmos Lake ~ Soft Light @ 100% (flipped vertically so the dark side is over the sky)
Mouse ~ Soft Light @ 70% (rotated so the dark side is over the sky)
Europium ~ Soft Light @ 42%
Touchstone ~ Overlay @ 100% (brushed away from gondolas)
A slight auto colour tweak to finish!
As ever, you can see the finished big version on my Flickr.

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$100 for Tex Box One and Two and the Fly Edges

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Please note that this is big, almost 400 mb file so the download may take a while. Average reported download time for this pack varies from 15 to 20 mins, perhaps a coffee break would be a good idea between downloads!

Road to the Sky

This was taken at the top of the Old Man Range, the mountain range that overlooks Alexandra and is over 6000 metres. There's a very steep road to the top, put in to service a TV transmitter. Going up there is like visiting a whole new world, it's remarkably flat on the top with the occasional huge rock tor rising out of the ground. The landscape at first glance looks barren but there are a multitude of low growing alpine plants, low growing because of the extreme climate, it's very exposed and windy and nothing on the top "plain" grows more than a few centimetre high. In winter it's covered in snow, and when we were up there in midsummer there were still patches of snow in the valleys.

This is one of the many photos I took up there....
All the textures I used were from the second pack.
Lavender Skies @Overlay 69% This is a remarkably versatile texture. I used it in this case to lighten up the under exposed foreground. Some of the texture was removed from the sky using a mask.
Beowulf @ Overlay 100 %
Algae @ Soft Light 75%
Algae @ Overlay 33 %

This combination gave a soft watercolour look to the landscape (which looks much better bigger than the small version you see here or on flickr).

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