Snow under the Evergreen

This is one where I like my black and white stamp filter edited version the best of all. 

HDR and snow typically do not go together. The high dynamic range that is brought out in these images treats the snow as though it is hiding something (it is!) and finds all of the possible darkness that is lurking in the snow, so that when you process an image of snow in HDR, it usually comes out looking rather dirty. 

I take the HDR image, however, and use it for my stamp filtering process, because the HDR seems to help the stamp filter catch more of the details than are caught in the same image without the HDR. (At least, that's what I've observed in other comparisons that I have made when processing a stamp filtered image.) What I like about this image is the prominence of the tree trunk as the main focus of the image. It doesn't get lost in the background, even if its various branches and needles do. I also like how the snow came out white again, except for the grassy parts that had been poking through.

I also then merge (layer) the colored image back into the stamp filtered image, usually at somewhere between 60-70% opacity, so that the lines of the stamp filter give definition (kind of like outlining the edges) of the colored image. The color is diminished, but usually there is enough of it to give a comic book-style feeling to the image. While the image below is ok, and I like it just about as well as the original HDR image, my favorite for today is the black and white stamp filtered version above.

Thanks for stopping by!