This is a composite image where I put two photos together to create one.
The original Egypt image looked like this:
Now to find some tulips.
These should work:
This field was shot in the Netherlands, but the lighting isn’t too drastically different and the distance between the camera and field is similar to that of the Egypt picture.
When combined and edited to remove vehicles and garbage, it looked like this:
That’s not bad, but the sky is really boring. Besides, this is for a Christmas card, so maybe it should be more of a night scene.
While ordinarily changing the sky would require adding another layer in Photoshop and then adjusting the lighting on the whole image to match, Luminar 4 makes those changes stupidly easy. You just pick a sky, set it to match the lighting in the rest of the photo with the new sky, and all you need to do is tweak it a bit to get what you want.
Ok. It’s not exactly a night scene. But maybe a night scene with really bright artificial lighting in the foreground? It seemed ok for a Christmas card though, especially if I added “Happy Holidays” or something across the top.
While I liked the over-the-top fakeness for my Christmas card, I wanted something more realistic for competition. Something that was obviously fake, but that might fool someone for an instant. Something that would make the viewer to do a double-take and say “Wait. Tulips don’t grow in Egypt! Do they?”
So I went back to Luminar 4 and tried some other skies until I found one that looked realistic – but more interesting than the dusty dull sky in the original shot of the pyramids.
A little more tweaking, and I ended up with this:
What do you think? Did I succeed?