About the Image(s)

Camera settings ISO 1600, f 5.6, 1/80 sec hand-held in natural light.

This photo was taken in a tropical forest house at my local botanical garden. I was drawn to this tree trunk due to the texture and how the two different vines were climbing up the tree. I wanted to make this image look more imaginary than real so did the following edits.

In Lightroom I did basic edits to reduce noise, increase clarity, increase exposure on the lighted side of the trunk, and deepen the shadows on the darker side of the trunk, and reduced highlights (image 2). I then went into Topaz Studio 2 and added a preset called Expressionism. I customized the preset by reducing the opacity to 50% and increasing clarity and shadows in the Basic Adjustments layer.

I went back into Lightroom and used a graduated filter at an angle, to slightly increased exposure on the right background and where the light hit the front of the trunk. This resulted in image 3, which I thought would be my final, but I decided to take it into Photoshop and use the liquify filter tools to add a little more distortion in select areas. So I distorted the background some more using the Twirl Clockwise and then used the Forward warp to grab and distort small sections of the thick vine and some random leaves. So my actual final image had more movement within it and seemed a bit more imaginary.