Filters, dodge and burn

I originally thought this image was really bland and not very interesting at all, I decided I would try and make something of it with the help of photoshop, here is what I ended up with and I am quite surprised that I managed to make it so much more attractive to the eye.



I decided that I would attempt to create an ethereal and dream like feeling to the image when I first started. I decided to duplicate the original image onto a new layer add a "smart blur" filter and then set the layer properties of the filtered layer to "overlay", it instantly made a huge difference to the image, but the colours were still rather bland. In order to fix this, I added a colour balance adjustment layer so that I could change the colour of both layers at once instead of just one. I decided to enhance the blue in the water so that you can pick out the reflections more clearly and I also increased the reds so that the leaves don't look as dead as they do in the original image.
To finish off this image, I decided to burn and dodge the image in strategic places to enhance the overall look of the image. Instead of using the traditional dodge and burn tools, I used a new way which I recently learnt off an on-line tutorial, what I did was created a new layer, filled it with 50% grey, set the layer properties to soft light and began painting away on the layer with a white brush if I wanted that area to be lighter or a black brush to darken the areas. Once I was done dodging and burning I had arrived at an image that had met my ideas, the scene was looking much more glowing and ethereal, all that was left to do was to decrease the opacity of the dodge and burn layer since it was just slightly overpowering and to crop the image so that I could create a much more striking composition.