Touching up Old Butterfly JPEGs (Part 2)

Here is another installment in my Mackinac Island butterfly series from The Butterfly House.

What I did to process these images: 1) I took the original JPEG into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (dark ages, remember?). 2) I saved the image into a PSD file, and bumped the brightness up 50 and bumped it down 50 to create two more PSD files. 3) I dragged all three files into Photomatix, and... Voila!

Here is the original JPEG image:

And here is the Photomatix edited version:

The Photomatix version has a little bit more of a 'surreal' element going for it, which -- if that's your thing, you'll like it, and... if not, you'll probably hate it. Me, I wanted to bring out the colors in the butterfly (it almost has a stained glass window look to it). I don't like the look of the flower above the butterfly in the Photomatix version; I suppose I could Photoshop the old flower over top of the new one, or simply Photoshop the new butterfly into the old photo.