head's up

In a post I wrote earlier this week, Cruel Shoes inquired about the image I used for my masthead. She wrote:

I think it looks great so far. Tell me/us more about the photo you chose, because I really am drawn to it. Well done. :)

First, thank you for the lovely compliment. The image is a hybrid of a photograph we took at Maumee Bay State Park this past summer. I'm not sure whether it was myself or JQ that shot it but the image originally looked like this:

Since I planned on working in a long rectangular format, I brought the image into Photoshop and adjusted the composition until I saw something I was happy with.

Because I was working with a blue/brown color scheme I adjusted various levels and adjustment layers until I came up with this:

Which was okay—but then it was too blue. So I took the sky back to it's original format.

Better. Now it needed some brown. In goes the text and another layer and viola! We are almost done.

To bad that sky looks so bland. I need the clouds that are in the cropped portion of the original photograph. There you go.

Round off the corners and we are done. The original image also happens to be my laptop's current desktop image. Here's a look at my desktop:


Yes, it really looks like that.