Pine Barrens

Hi Harry

OK , so cool you did this with Orten.  I am a big Orten fan.  Anyway, I went and looked at your landscape one where you decreased clarity.  I think I prefer that one better as it seems more mysterious.  But , both are very nice.  Maybe on this one try to blend your layers differently, adding in more of the blur layer??  But that is what I would do, all in the eye of the artist.

BTW, I was just doing an Orten yesterday and I am curious what you used to get your blurred layer?  I had tried several techniques in photoshop in the past , but yesterday, I tried blurring the layer through Topaz using a couple of the blur techniques through lens effects. 

Best
Kathy

I used TK actions which has an Orton mask that I played with the opacities to see which looked realistic and not too over the top.  But for Photo Art, I guess over the top can work too, just not my tendency.  I haven't tried doing this in PS, so not idea.  Must be something on the web about this.

Harry, to compare this version with the landscape version, I opened two windows and then went to the larger view in both.  Switching between the two windows, worked great in that the image snapped from one to the other without moving on the screen.  That type of viewing shows how subtle your blurring and slight brightening is.  I like how your blur amount softens the leaves while leaving the trunks decently clear, which got me wondering about how more blur on the leaves and less blur on the trunks would look.  A way to do that in PS is:
  1) duplicate the background layer (I click and drag to the "new layer" icon on the properties panel).
  2)  apply a gaussian blur to the new layer
  3)  Add a black mask and then paint in white with a moderate opacity (I like 25 - 30%) to adjust where and how much blur gets applied.  With a very soft blur brush, you should be able to get only a little blur on the trunks using the brush edges, while controlling the amount of blur in the leaves with the number of brush strokes.

Hi Harry

My method is identical to Mark's, except that I am recently using Topaz to generate the blur layer and the mask.  The lens effect filter in Topaz can produce various types of blurs and then you can play with both the opacity and masking.  There are several ways to create the masks, both through luminosity and reverse luminosity, and through brush.  

Kathy

Mark - That is essentially what I did to retain the trunk detail in the nearest trees. I duplicated the original sharper image (Landscape Gallery), and placed the blurred image in between, then erased selectively so as not to blur too much. To bring out more trunk detail, I could have done so in a similar way with a higher clarity layer created in ACR,  but didn't want to overly sharpen, especially when web viewing.  Thanks!