Tennessee Fence (Posterized Photo)

This image began with another of the many photos that I took in December while visiting Nashville.  I took a lot of photos from the car, which always means a lot of editing. Today I was feeling inspired to do some editing because yesterday I "eavesdropped" on a photo editing workshop at the Apple Store while I was waiting for an appointment at the genius bar. It was very helpful! There were several problems in the original version of this photo. The shadows were too dark, there was blur in the foreground, and some of the fence posts were leaning. You can easily get leaning fence posts, which is just what happens when you photograph out of the side window of a moving car.  The most extreme problem is usually at either edge of the photo, so I cropped out the worst of the fence posts, and then opened the image in Painter and straightened out one of the fence posts that was still leaning too much. I used with digital pastel, with a grid over the image to guide me.  Then I posterized the photo, playing around to get the right amount of effect. Finally I went back to iPhoto and did some detailed editing of the shadows in the trees, and adjusted the cast to get a bit more green.