Working with layers

I recently took the girls on a day trip to the crater Puluahua, which is near the Equator. We've been to the top and looked down into the crater, but this time we went down into it.

It was neat because we were up in the clouds, which added to the feeling as we listened to A Christmas Carol.

As we came back out, I saw some cows grazing in a field; with the clouds rolling through and the dry corn stalks, it had a real autumn feeling to it. I wanted to get a photo that really emphasized all of those elements of autumn - the harvested stalks, the clouds and mist, and the desaturated colors. After some work I ended up with the below photo:

The original photo didn't quite capture what I was looking for, so I did some post-processing work using various layers.

One of the first layers I added was some additional mist. I kept waiting for more clouds to roll through but they stayed higher than I wanted. So I took a picture of the higher clouds and made that into a separate background image:



I added this as a layer on top of the original and then adjusted the opacity of it so I got a sense of the mist, but it didn't obscure the image below it. This was a quick creation - I plan to work on it a bit to make it a bit more random. Right now there is a definite grid pattern, resulting from me copying and pasting bits of the same thing over and over again.

Next I added another layer on top of the original - a black and white copy of the original. I adjusted the contrast so it was a bit darker. Then I lowered the opacity of this layer as well so I ended up with a desaturated version of the image revealed.

Then I bumped up the saturation of the colors on the bottom original until I had what I was looking for as far as colors go.

Finally I added a slight vignette around the image to darken the borders a bit.