Sunlight on Autumn Leaves (Posterized)

Sunlight on Autumn Leaves (Posterized), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

On Thursday, we went to Long Hill Gardens to pick up our farm share from the CSA. (It was one of the last weeks.) I was admiring some of the autumn leaves on shrubs near the fields. They looked great in the strong afternoon light so I took some pictures with my iPhone camera. When I loaded the images into my computer, I noticed that one of the pictures was washed out at the edges with very bright light. I decided to see what I could do with it because it is fun to solve problems like that, and sometimes posterizing a photo can create amazing effects with diffused light. So I cleaned up the image with some retouching in iPhoto, and then opened the image in Painter. I did some cropping to focus on the leaves and in the process, eliminated some of the white areas. Then I posterized the image, and here is the result.