Saving an image.... a total rescue.

RB and I went out to play in the mountains of SC and NC over the weekend.  We had some amazing weather and it was just too nice to not get out there.   The problem was we decided on this little jaunt in the mid afternoon and the light was...  ummm...  horrid.  I only shot three frames the entire afternoon and they were all of the same spot.   Symmes Chapel A.K.A. pretty place in the Greenville's YMCA camp.   Robin shot a bunch, but I had been there on prettier days and just wasn't feeling it.

So as an exercise I decided to see if I could rescue the shot I did up there with some photoshop wizardry...

That is the shot I took of Symmes Chapel...  kinda average at best.  I was planning ahead and my other two shows were a lighter and darker version of the same shot.  (not adding those images.. you can figure out what lighter and darker look like LOL)

When you run those three shots through Photomatix and combine them you get this....

Better right??  But still not great.

I kinda liked the halo around the cross so I made that more prominent.... then I added a texture layer overlay of a bible verse I had from a recent wedding...   you end up with this after those changes.  :-)

That night we were around a roaring bonfire and RB did this shot of the coals... 

 I begged / pilfered the shot below from her and re-cropped it to suit my needs.

I added that shot on top of my already layered shot then used a layer mask in photoshop to brush away the center part of the coals and  make the cross visible again with the coals along the outside of the image.

That left me with....

Yeah, this is really what I do in my time off from photography LOL.