Weekly Travel Theme: Silver

I’ve been traveling a bit lately and it is cold here in the Midwest.  I took this photo from a hotel room in Indianapolis, Indiana:

ISO 2500 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/40

That’s actually a lake in the foreground, but it is frozen and snow covered now.  I’ll show you the original photo at the end of this post. I shot the original with the white balance set on cloudy, because it was cloudy and I knew would accentuate the blue in the scene.  It was cold, and I thought I would like the way the blue would turn out.  As it happens, I wasn’t crazy about it.  

I mention the white balance first because when I opened the original in Camera Raw, it was the first thing I changed.  From there I opened the photo in Photoshop.  Then I straightened the photo using the level within the crop tool.  From there I added a gradient map layer.  The gradient map is what allowed me to add the silver cast to this photo.  With the gradient map open, I chose two shades of silver.  That actually made the photo too dark. So, I changed the blending mode and dropped the opacity.  I would normally apply some sort of sharpening technique as a last step, but I decided I wanted the photo to have a slightly dreamy feel, and I thought sharpening might kill that effect.

Here is the original:

ISO 2500 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/40

Quite a different feel to the two different photos don’t you think?  Do you like the silver that I have added? Silver is the theme this week at Where’s My Backpack? Perfect for a cold scene like this.  Feel free to leave a comment below and I hope this finds you warm.

Cheers!