© Brad Mangas

The ever changing ice forms of winter can be a real treat to explore and photograph. Shapes and textures seem limited only by ones imagination. And then through in a golden clear winter sunset, some snow and trees and you have Winter Gold. At least it seemed a fitting description to me. I’m always curious of the names some people give their images. I would be happy not having to bother with a name but some description seems necessary for images, be they photographs, painting, drawings and the like. It might be fun to post an image every now and again and have everyone who visits the post give it name, hmm might have to keep that in mind.

Some extra processing of this image was done to help bring out the texture and details in the ice. I started with a Topaz Adjust layer with a soft light blending mode applied with the base image layer. I used Topaz to simple bring out texture and detail with no additional color adjustment done. Then with the look I liked I applied my digital velvia adjustment layer which really brought out the golden glow to the shot. That does remind me about the digital velvia action I wrote up a while back. I made it available as a download saved as a photoshop action file. When I upgraded this blog to and changed the theme those old posts were not brought in. There was a little mishap when I made the theme change along with changing the domain to what it is now (https://https://bradmangas.com). But, if anyone would like the digital velvia action file just drop me a note and I can email you the file. You simply load it into the actions of photoshop. I named it velvia 140 due to my color preset are at 140 which is high for maximum color enhancement. It can be to much for some images but one just needs to adjust the opacity if less color is needed.

When I first looked at this shot after bringing it into photoshop I thought the tree line and sunset were going to be the main subject of the shot and that was the intent when taken. the frozen lake leading up to the tree lined sunset. That may be why I initially disregarded this shot after an attempt or two of processing it with that in mind. With the addition of the topaz adjust layer the focus immediately (to me anyway) became the ice and the details in the ice. Then the color in the ice and then the tree lined winter sunset. I think it show the importance of the foreground to an image.  The background of a shot could be good but if your eyes are hit with a boring uninteresting foreground at first, it kind of takes the appeal right out of the whole shot. I don’t want to underestimate the color in this either, it’s a color I haven’t achieved in any other shot I can recall.  Golden? I hope so, since I just named int “Winter Gold”.