Gold Leaf - Blue Sky

Having researched Bill Atkinson I wanted to use vivid colour when creating some of the autumnal images I was hoping to create. Blue skies and golden leaves contrasting against each other. Hence I started with the following image.

As with all images I needed to crop the original to A3 size at 300 dpi.

The next step was, as usual, to take a background copy of the original to protect it.

Using the clone stamp tool I removed a couple of twigs and blurred images that detracted from the main topic.

I was basically happy with the image and the level of colour in the image. However I wanted to add a little more richness to the colours, which were a little pale. Rather than trying to mess around with levels, I was able to achieve this by reducing the brightness slightly (-8) and slightly increasing the contrast (+ 14)

Ultimately arriving at the final images as below.