I opened the unedited image (Dave gave me the RAW file) in ACR then tweaked the colors and exposure, one for the sky and one for the landscape. For the colors I bumped up the warming slider so the image wouldn't be quite so blue. Next, I pulled them into Photoshop and with layers I overlaid the lighter version over the darker and basically just erased the sky so the clouds would have more texture.


The most time consuming part of the edit was eliminating the trees in the foreground. To eliminate the ones to the left I selected a large area of the image where the foreground trees and grasses were and feathered it at 150 pixels then just copied/pasted it over the trees I wanted to eliminate. I did this several times. I also erased elements of the selections after pasting them so it wasn't too uniform looking. For the tree on the right I just did a lot of cloning.


For the final color and contrast editing I used Nik ColorEfex Pro's Tonal Contrast and Brilliance/Warmth. To add a little more punch to the sky I used Topaz's Clarity and bumped up the saturation in the blue only. This could all be done in PS with similar results. A person could simply increase saturation a little, go to the individual colors and tweak those then increase contrast. It's not quite the same effect but I used those tools a long time before getting Nik. Same with Topaz. You can go into the saturation and select cyan and bump up the saturation and/or change the hue a little.


For the effects on the following images after that first one I simply used Nik's ColorEfex's Indian Summer and it automatically changes green foliage to something resembling autumn. To add the water to the 3rd image I used Flaming Pear's Flood filter. I think that is still available online as well. I believe it may be free but not sure. If it's not free it's not an expensive plugin. I've had a copy of that for nearly as long as I've been editing digital photos. On the painted looking edit I used Topaz's Simplify.


http://www.flamingpear.com/flood.html


If anyone has any questions feel free to ask.


Sharon