205. Steam

‘Prismatic Sunset’ - Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowtone National Park, Wyoming, USA
photo by Joaquin Baldwin
website - https://www.joaquinbaldwin.com/
original image - https://i.imgur.com/K68SA1z.jpg

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A really nice capture of the Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring. The iconic steam coming ouyt of it was missing (actually, I think it went to the left), so I added it in. This was much, mich harder to do than it seems, due to the reflection - I had to mask out all those meandering lines where the stone shelves jut out of the water, where the steam wouldn't be reflected.

As far as the color grade goes, this is the one photo where the original argubly looks better, or 'more designed.' But it's too unnatural for me - the sky is never really that shade of cyan-gray. So I let some color back in.

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200. Another Big Round Number

‘Sunrise at the Ghost Town of Old Paria’ - Paria, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah, USA
photo by John Fowler
website - https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowpeak/
original image - https://unsplash.com/photos/5bv-_tIwHFk

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Beautiful lighting and combination of colors. But there was something strange about the sky - there were some strange colors and halos where it met the cliffs. Possibly the clouds were added in later, or maybe it was just a result of a long exposure.

Whatever the case, I decided to do a sky replacement of my own to remove the artefacts. So now it's definitely a composit. I really liked the original atmosphere, so I tried to stay true to it as much as possible - which was not easy. I also darkened the whole thing.

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193. It's Just Dozing Off

‘The Other Side’ - Mount Bromo, Tengger mountains, Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, East Java, Indonesia
photo by Iswanto Arif
website - https://www.instagram.com/iswanarif/
original image - https://unsplash.com/photos/PNAD9NjsYb4

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Really looks impresive from this high a viewpoint. It was probably taken from a chopper, so I thought, why not have one in the photo.

I also pushed the blacks.

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191. Retro

Train tracks, Vitebsk Region, Belarus
photo by Irina Iriser
website - https://www.instagram.com/iriser_ph/
original image - https://unsplash.com/photos/nYIQYg8cQVc

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I thought this photo, while very nice and retro-looking, needed a point of interest. So have a guitar player.

In addition to compositing him in, I also pushed the blacks.

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182. Purplish-magenta

Huangshan Mountains (Yellow Mountains), Anhui province, China
photo by Pavel Dvořák Jr.
website - https://www.flickr.com/photos/41709344@N07/
original image - https://wiki-travel.com.vn/Uploads/picture/NguyenBinhVTV-155405105401-Huangshan.jpg
Windows 10 Spotlight version - https://windows10spotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/73098dd6129c9024ea6dc6ed06d53602.jpg

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This was a difficult one. I ran into it in Windows 10 Spotlight, and I immediatelly liked it, especially the purplish-magenta tint, but it was obviously taken too far - so-much-so that it started looking airbrushed. I wanted a hint of those colors, but still somewhat plausible. The thing is, it was difficult to track down the original photo - apparently, the photographer took several of them in a short span of time (the clouds and the canopies move a bit between them), and they each came cropped slightly differently. So this is a composit of several of them.

Then I made the colors similar to Windows 10 Spotlight ones, only not so drastic.

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176. A Tree Apart

‘Angels on Green’ - Moravian Tuscany near Kyjov, South Moravian Region, Czech Republic
photo by Aleksandr Larin
website - N/A
original image - https://cutewallpaper.org/21/grassland-wallpaper/Wallpaper-Grassland-Landscape-Green-Huawei-MediaPad-M5-.jpg

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What a beautiful photo. Apparently, the leftmost tree is of a different kind then the other three, but I found a photo of the same motif by another photographer that had all of them in bloom. So I took the in-bloom one and composited it here, because otherwise, I liked this photo more.

Other than that, I deepened the colors and blacks.

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170. Vanishing Point

Train tracks during golden hour, unknown location
photo by Al Ishrak Sunny
website - https://www.instagram.com/ishrak__sunny/
original image - https://unsplash.com/photos/ZRJurausAc0

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Another nice atmosphere, but I thought it needed something more, hence the girl. She is a composit too - the legs are not originally hers.

Except putting-in the girl, I also cleaned-up some horrible JPEG artefacts from the sky.

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165. Teal and Orange

A winding road north of Montreal, Québec, Canada
photo by Petunia-Rivers
website - https://www.reddit.com/user/Petunia-Rivers/
original image - https://i.redd.it/foso4l8ieji21.jpg

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I usually don't like too radical color grading (unless I do it), but this photo is an exception. It found it on reddit's I Took A Photo. It's the classic, overused teal-and-orange color scheme, and I love it anyway. The road so oversaturated that it actually turned teal somehow looks great. The shallow depth-of-field also looks great. It's just one of those photos that shoud be unremarkable, but it just happens to strike you the right way. But I agree with one of the reddit commenters, it was missing a point of interest. Hence the snail. So it's a composit.

Unfortunatelly, it had a terrible vignette that I had to get rid of. I also darkened the whole things while I was at it.

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