A sign winter is here.

[johnnya]

I am just looking my way around photoshop elements 4.0 so I am not at all familiar with it. Is there a way to make the icicles look like Christmas light icicles? Like making them different colours?
Looking forward to seeing what can be done.
Thanks3774
Nikon D80
F-stop - f 4.8
Exposure - 1/30 sec
ISO speed - ISO 100
Focal Length - 42mm

[DoctorJazz]

Great photo to play with color! It's not quite what you were looking for, but I'll
post it, and keep working on more.
Just played with color saturation, highlights, and softening in Lightroom2.

[johnnya]

Thats cool. I was thinking more of different colors like christmas lights.

[DoctorJazz]

OK......more colors......more to come.

[coffee]

Thanks for the oportunity. It was a fun edit in that it gave me the chance to do a lot of dodging and burning. This image really lent itself to paint in a lot of shadows and highlights because of the bright ice, and dark leaves. Hope it adds to the image. The first image is the original, second is my edit.

Work done:
Extensive dodging and burning of highlights and shadows.
Vibrance and saturation of leaves and rock.
sharpening of rock.
Contrast adjustment.
Selective sharpening of dark portions of ice.
Selective darkening of shadowed rock.
Selective increase of highlights levels in ice.
Global adjustments in levels, contrast, sharpening, and overall levels.

Toggle between each image to see the changes.

[Pat]

Hello johnnya. I don't know about looking like Christmas lights. Introduce colour, yes, but it looks like coloured ice to me.
And introducing the colour in a half realistic way was a bit of a challenge. I'm not sure that I rose to the occassion, but it's getting late, so here's roughly what I did:

duplicated bkgd layer.
Created a custom gradient (multi-hued, closely spaced colouring).
Roughly selected the icicle area.
Moved selection to a new layer and filled with gradient.
selected top part of gradient and skewed to the left.
Apllied gradient to ice layer with a displacement map.
Applied distort-glass filter.
Duplicated coloured ice layer and combined (multiply) a couple of times.
Applied layer style-bevel and emboss to coloured ice layer.
Saved as jpeg.


When I saved the pic I reduced the size to 800 pixels wide. Otherwise I would have had to lower the quality so far to get it under 585.9k so as to make the exercise pointless.

[johnnya]

All very nice and different. I hope to become efficient enough on photoshop soon. My priority is learning how to take quality photos first.
Thanks guys , Hope ya's had fun with it.
JohnnyA

[johnnya]

OK......more colors......more to come.

That's very VERY cool.

[sorted]

Hi

Hope you don't mind I had a play :)

[DoctorJazz]

Threw some more color in.....best not to look at it too long. I'm having way too much fun!

[johnnya]

That's more like I was thinking :). Very cool Doctor. Could you post how you accomplished this. I'm glad your having fun.

[DoctorJazz]

Hi johnnya,

I'm just using the adjustment brush and selecting from the color palette in Lightroom2, and adjusting opacity, lightness, darkness as I go along.
Once I select the colors, I go back with the adjustment brush and play with
changing the clarity and brightness either up or down depending on how it looks.

I am a novice at this , so this is a good way for me to learn how much control I actually have with Lightroom2. Thanks for the opportunity!

[johnnya]

Very cool Doctor. I'm loving it. Keep running with it lol :D

[StephenK]

Great picture Johnny!

Just saw it last night and had a few minutes to play with it this morning.... I tend to use channels masks a lot and
saw this as a great exercise to use them to help embed color somewhat seamlessly into the image. Lot's of
blending modes stuff as well.... Following my work-flow is pretty convoluted... :^) But here's what I've come up
with so far! :^)