Travel Theme: Through

I had been going through some older pictures this week including some from a trip to Yellowstone.  It was interesting that the theme at Where’s My backpack? for this week was through.  I thought that this photo of a geyser bursting through the earth fit the topic, so I did some editing, and here is my version for the challenge:

ISO 100 9mm 0ev f/7 1/500

I’ll show the original at the bottom, but the photo was a bit flat and some of the details were lost.  From the original I created two adjustment layers, one was exposure and one was levels.  I did the levels layer first.  I chose a section of the grass and then created a mask, then I painted in white, to reveal the lighter ground.  For the exposure level, I chose a section of the trees, then created a mask and again painted in white to reveal a bit of detail in them.  Then I flattened the image and did a shadows/highlights/midtone adjustment.  Then I sharpened the photo a bit.

Here is the original:

ISO 100 9mm 0ev f/7 1/500

Part of the reason I chose this photo to edit was that I really like the sky in the original version. What do you think of the edited version?  Do you edit your vacation photos, or do you prefer to leave them as is?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!