Summer to Winter

Original

Process

I wanted to start with a beautiful scenic shot, to begin with, so I went looking for lake shots from New Zealand. Feeling in a Lord of the Rings mood I decided to add some new features to the photo, being a stone tower and bridge and stone castle. First I decided to replace the sky and desaturate the whole image to get me started on the process of changing the season. The Next thing I did was paste in a photo of snow-covered grasslands along the shores of the lake. I followed up this by replacing the lake with some beautiful blue and white ice with a bit of perspective and color tweaking. I also masked the opacity of the lake to let subtle reflections happen in the smoother parts of the ice. I then began trying to mess with the mountains by hand painting some snow into the mountains and later followed this up by splicing in some patches of snow covered mountain tops. I then began to paint via the stamp tool some snow covered trees onto the mountain to the left. I original desaturated and hand painted snow onto the trees in the foreground but this looked bad, so I spliced in some actual snow-covered pine trees and did a bit of editing with the stamp tool. Afterward, I started hand painting and editing in some snow on the human-made structures and even copied some snow on my mountains to past onto the sides of my castle and tower to imply that snow clung to the stone walls.  Finally, I used a mix of filters and painted effects to create a snowy haze that would linger off in the distance.