Twice The Gold And Copper

This image looks better full size!

I had this gorgeous shot of the St-Jacques river in La Prairie, Quebec, that I made early one morning a few weeks ago. However, the sky was cloudy and gray, with a very weak sun, making everything look flat and dull. On the other hand, there was absolutely no wind and the river was totally still with amazing reflections, so I thought I had to try something to salvage the shot.

I decided to see if I could bring it to life with some post-processing effects in Photoshop. I applied a fake polarizing effect (applying gaussian blur to a duplicate layer in grayscale, then inverting and blending in overlay mode), boosted the saturation a little and played with levels and curves in adjustment layers. I also cropped and cloned out a few distracting bits in the foreground.

Focal length 18mm
ISO-200
Aperture f/4.5
Shutter 1/80 sec.

Nikon D60
AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G VR

Featured in Freedom to Shine on November 30th, 2008

Featured in the Lakes and Inland Waterways group on April 28, 2009