About the Image(s)

It was a perfect day when we visited Oceanside, OR. It is really a small village on the coast. We sat in one of the three tiny restaurants, the one overlooking the water. As I gazed out of the window, I immediately noticed the curve of the bushes on the cliff, which wrapped around the picturesque side the looming, rocky haystacks in the water. After lunch, we found a way to get into the yard beneath the window at which we sat. I couldn’t resist taking that picture with my phone. I don’t carry my heavy camera anymore, and the phone does a pretty good job, in my opinion.

To develop it, I:

1. Opened NIK Color Efex Pro and applied Darken/Lighten Center, moving the center point to the haystacks. Then applied Pro Contrast to bring out the colors and shapes.

2. Notice the weather front on the horizon in Original 2. It was moving west rather rapidly, and I didn’t get a chance to photograph the scene before it dropped down below the haystacks on the horizon. But I wanted to keep it in the image. I also wanted to capture the dreamy feeling of the scene, for the seaside is always a dreamy experience!

3. I duplicated the layer and applied Topaz Impressions and chose Cezanne II style to the image, though I changed the default brush and its characteristics.

4. The Cezanne application took away a lot of the emphasis on the storm front, so I tried to rectify that by selecting the storm front in the original image, and then applying a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, on which I decreased the brightness. The resulting mask was black with white on the selection.

5. I used a soft brush and white paint along the top edges of the white selection, to soften its transition to the upper sky.

6. It didn’t look dreamy enough for me, so I went into NIK Color Efex Pro and added one Graduated Fog preset to the edges of each of the four sides.

Hope it gives all of you a dreamy feel!