Last weekend was a bit cold and rainy, but I spotted some plants sprouting up around the apartment. I was pumped and grabbed my camera to snap some pictures. I forgot my lunch at home one day this week and I ran home to eat. The sun was out and the Crocus plants that were just buds on Saturday were blooming! I knew I couldn’t pass up this photo opp. Here’s one of my favorites:

If you like it, you can check out a slideshow of my spring 2010 pictures so far.

And here is the original:

I was going for a “hyper color” type of look (unrelated: does anyone remember those t-shirts from back in the day that changed color with heat? I always wanted one of those). My first task was to sharpen up the subject with the Sharpen filter. After sharpening, I noticed that a lot of noise had been introduced, so I used the Despeckle filter.

I don’t know exactly what I did to achieve the final look–it involved a lot of trial and error with Hue & Saturation, Color Balance, Brightness & Contrast, and Vibrance. I finished off by adding a lens flare.

And here’s the original.

The original had great depth of field so I didn’t want to do anything that would take away from the soft focus in the background. I decided to try out a spot color type effect and liked it, but felt like a black & white background just didn’t work. I used a warming filter to make it more of a sepia tone.

And here is my “fix.”

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And here’s my version:

Photoshop was my tool of choice. I wanted the snowman to appear sort of “magical”, so I started by isolating it and giving it an inner glow, outer glow, and color overlay. I then isolated the girl from the background and applied an inner and outer glow for her as well. I then used the Vibrance adjustment to make her face a lot more saturated in color.

The hardest part was developing the texture for the background. I was going for a whimsical/wintry look. I ended up using the Clouds and Fiber rendering effects.