204 - After the Rain

This is a funny image. I took it yesterday evening, when after a rainy day suddenly the sun came out and I stood in the garden, looking over our fence down the hill.

I did the usual things with this image and still was unsatisfied, but I decided that it would have to do. After having it uploaded to Smugmug this morning, I found out what had nagged me. The image had a tilted horizon. You know I normally have no problem at all with tilted horizons, but in this case it had no purpose. I simply looked wrong.

I loaded the PSD file again, did a “Select all/Copy merged/Paste” and with the “Lens Correction” filter I rotated the image to get the mountains level, and at the same time I scaled the image up by 110% to make it again fit into the borders.

I didn’t like it either. It had lost too much of the fence. While switching the rotated layer on and off, I suddenly had the desperate idea to use a mask and try to combine the two images. This worked so well that I ended up with an image where only the mountains are from the rotated layer.

What’s so funny you ask? Well, funny is that, although I exactly know what I did, I can’t tell from the result where the seams are. Not in this resolution anyway, but not even in 100%. It’s perfect. I never would have thought such a thing possible and if anybody would have asked me if it could work, I would have answered “probably, but it would be so much work that it’s hardly worth the hassle”. It took me two minutes. Amazing.

The Song of the Day is the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer classic “Come Rain or Come Shine” in the incredibly relaxed version that B.B. King and Eric Clapton did on their 2000 album “Riding with the King”.