Tropical VOAT

I used only a few filters this time and layered them: Desaturate and Cut out. I also stole a Brachiosaur, flipped him over horizontally, scaled him smaller, and made him a shadow.  I like to add drama to images!

 I thought it would be fun to have a foreground image, and tried to get rid of house, but decided I liked it better in the distance. It gives the dino a scale by being in the distance. . 

Here's a  desaturated layer  which has been made higher contrast for layering.  I did not find a spot that I thought would make a good color spot, so I didn't do that.  I could have just erased a spot, if I had wanted to, but I would more likely have erased all but the spot on another layer and dragged that layer on top of this one.  

 Color balance to red, done in two steps, first the blues. I did color range select to get them, and color balance to get the reds. Then I did inverse selection to change the other side. It did not work to try to do the whole image at once. 

 Sunset. This is the desaturated image set to multiply on top of the red image. Expeirment with the desat layers, as you can change the effects of evertyhing with the layer blending,a nd it can be very subtle. This is one way to get more contrast in a low contrast picture and it does not look as fake as using contrast directly. 

 This is the cututo filiter, which makes the image look like a bad paint by number. It too can do interesting things as an overlay.  It's good to make a lot of different layers and turn them on and off to see what the cumulative effects can be.  You get many surprises that way. 

 Cutout layer set to overlay on top of desat layer. Storm Front coming!

The details come from the desat, and the colors, though washed out, come from the cutout layer.  It looks edited, but I liked it anyway.

 Here's Dino out for a bit of a splash. The splash was just painted in on the shadow layer with a very fuzzy brush in gray. the shadow layer is on top of dino. His feet in the water were slightly erased with the same brush set to erase and just clicked instead of dragged.

This one has the dino layer on top, then the cutout layer and then the  red layer. It does not look realistic, but it was fun to do.  If I had made an overlay of the red and put it on top of dino, he woudl have matched the color better.  I could have blurred the cutout layer as well.

  Finally a ghost of dino made by putting the cutout overlay on top of dino and an unaltered background underneath. Note that the colors are washed out with the overlay, even though it has colors. 

 Please look at the larger images and let me know what you think. Thanks for dropping by!