Originally posted by Rickster Come on folks, let see some more examples!
Okay! I like the idea of this thread. I just haven't had time... (aren't we all in the same boat there?) So I'm resurrecting it for you:
top one: unretouched jpg from raw output: (infrared image taken with Hoya R72 filter, white balanced off the clouds, that was the only thing giving a reading at the time)
After converting the RAW, I converted to grayscale using Cybia's Retrograde filter. ($8, though I highly recommend their free version too, called "B&W Plus")
Then I did a little burning in the clouds, a little dodging on the foreground.
Then I wanted to kind of do a "lensbaby" effect, because I'm too damn cheap to buy one, so I feathered an elliptical selection tool (Photoshop Elements) by about 100 pixels, and put the ellipse around the tree. Finally I inversed the selection and did a radial blur, to leave a fairly clean tree with a nice blur all around.