I realize it's not Halloween season, but I was fooling with this image trying to get an eerie night scene out of it. What do you all think? Does it look convincing enough? Any pointers for improvement?

This is rather creepy...what is needed here now for a bit more freak-out factor is a pair of skeletal hands creeping around the trunk of the tree! Cool night shot by the way A! :-)>

Looks creepy. Good looking pic. But I agree with CrystalWizard. The headstones, town and sky look like a different photo from the tree. The background looks flat, compared to the tree. I really like it, so take my comments with a grain of salt. --Randy R

one sharp image wqith a surprising amount of detail for such low exposure, which me thinks is spot on. The only thing I have against is the blue/purple tint, but don't worry, that's just the laptop's screen I'm on right now. As for the background, it wouldn't look as flat if there were clouds. Dammit women, haven't you learned to control the weather yet? Only thing I can think of is to maybe darken the background a tad, let it leave some things to the imagination or something. Cool stuff Salina

I like the tree, that works really well, have to agree the background does look flat in comparison. On a bright moon lit night the whole scene should catch the light, just not as much as the tree. could you isolate the background & adjust the levels a bit? Don't know if that would do it or not... The colour is good, makes it really eerie.

elusive.chaos

"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star...." (Nietzsche)

Just to give you all an idea of what this picture looked like originally, and how drastically you can modify an image digitally, here's the original. I'm not quite happy with the tint either. I was going for a selenium blue/moonlight sort of duo-tone, but my image manip. program has no direct way of doing that, I had to experiment with a "filter pack" plug-in and then mess with the saturation. The tint doesn't look too obvious on this monitor (I was going for something very subtle) but I can't seem to get the color "cold" enough. Does Photoshop have a duo-toning tool, or does it require a less direct technique? If so, could someone (Michelle did a great job in her "Feeling Blue" image a while ago) explain how it's done? I'm going to re-do the image a couple of ways, one with the background darkened so that there is just a hint of gravestones, and one with the background lightened to give the impression of a more evenly moonlit graveyard. I'll post them both for comparison purposes and get your opinions again. Thanks for the input everyone.

I think the flat sky is perfect for emphasizing the tree if the tree is the main focus of the image, which in my mind it is.

This idea just popped into my head and I don't know if it would work or not...... Are you using PS? If so.... Filter/Render/Clouds on a new layer.....then mask out the cloud areas you don't want to show. That might make the background seem a little less flat? In all honesty I thought this image looked just fine until the flatness was pointed out....and then I could see what they meant.

I am, therefore I create.......
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