Karasu, The Lake Acarlar

This is my hometown in Turkey. I had this shot sometime ago and now I processed it. For this one I used my recent techniques to get the sky blues is and plus a touch of purple. First, when I tone mapped the image in photomatix, I made the temperature blueish -5, -6. It could be left 0 if the photo already look ok enough. I habe been using the smoothing almost at max, 10, recently. It gives more natural and better looking sky results. Then I further process the photo in photoshop. First, I max the clarity in lightroom then open it in PS. Next, I went back to lightroom, made the white balance more blueish, and again open it in PS. Now I have two photos with different white balance. I copy past the blue sky onto other one as a layer, and add a black layer mask to it, painted the sky in the layer mask white to reveal it onto other image. This is relatively an easy PS trick, I will hopefully make a video about it soon. Enjoy the photo!