I felt like playing a bit with today's photo. It's another extremely hot and humid day in Little Rhody, so I didn't plan to spend much time outside grabbing the shot. My initial thought was to see if a blue heron that's been hanging out at Georgiaville Pond behind the Smith Appleby House was around and in a decent position to be photographed. When I pulled into the lot, though, I spotted this makeshift wooden barrier protecting a field of weeds. The heron would have to wait. I can never resist scenes like this. The only thing missing was a dead tree.
Post processing is where I decided to have some fun. I started with a photo pop filter in Topaz Adjust, and then adjusted the levels just a bit for color tone and contrast. The image at that point was nice and I almost hit the "save" button, but then my mind went down the "what if" path. I played around with some gradients in soft light blend mode, and they were doing some really interesting things with the overall image. I liked a couple of options there, but figured I'd try the same gradients in hue blend mode. That's when I spotted this one. The gradient is a copper to yellow and the blend mode is hue. Now, at that point, everything really looked like it was gold leafed (which is what sparked the title.) I wanted to age that feel a bit, though, so added a saturation adjustment, lowering the saturation to get the effect you see here. It was a fun play session.
