I stumbled upon this pile of brightly colored leaves on a very overcast day. Diffuse light on cloudy days is often terrific for rich saturation and smooth tones. Not normally inclined to using Photoshop, I thought the image felt a little overwhelming in all its colorful glory. (See "Real Leaf Before"). So, I thought maybe it would be nice and more surprising and more interesting if just a handful of the leaves were richly colorful, and the rest were duller and more decayed looking. In Photoshop, with a combination of using the Magic Wand and then hand-painting to refine the multi-leaf selection (See "Real Leaf Mask"), I isolated on a good grouping. With that mask in place I called up a Hue/Saturation window and desaturated the remaining leaves until most of the color was gone. In the end, I arrived at something like a hand-tinted photograph—a little bit photo, a little bit watercolor painting. (See "Real Leaf After").
