A picture of a beautiful old home, cropped, ballanced, punched up and retouched but. The biggest change is the sky. Matching sky's can be surprisingly difficult. If the light on the clouds isn't falling in the same direction as the subject recieving it, it will fail to look convincing. In this example I found a sky online, flipped it, copied it 4 times and then cobbled it all together. The greatest challenge in cobbling is a matter of hiding duplicate shapes. Like everything in nature, no 2 clouds are alike. The most laborious part of this project involved cleaning up the selections around the foliage. Many an edge left by the old light blue sky had to be manually eradicated but in the end if you weren't told, you wouldn't be looking for it. With the drama of that sky, the dark foliated vignette and insistent autumnal light blasting through the center, it seems very much like an oil painting, a portrait of a house, a rather stately one at that.
