Backwater Glade Geek Sheet

Please excuse the file size - any more compression and I would have lost all of the drizzle in the image.

I did this in response to a challenge posed by the Bryce Forum: Scene Theme - Rainy Day, Dream Away. The 3-D scene behind the picture is 25.5 Mb in size and consists of 35 Terrains, 8 DXF models (the leaves on the trees) and a stone.

I rendered the scene with some low fog, a distance mask and a mask for the foreground water. In Photoshop I first desaturated the rendering, using my distance mask to desaturate the background more than the foreground. Then I sampled two prominent tones of blue from the image and used them to create a frame full of fractal clouds. I added some uniform noise to the clouds and used the distance mask to blend the noisy clouds into the original image, more in the background, less in the foreground.

Next I copied the result, pasted it into a new layer and added the rainbow using KPT's Gradient On Paths tool in Positive Procedural Blend mode. With the layer blending set to Normal I brought the opacity setting down until I liked the result, and I used the Eraser Tool to delete and tone down parts of the rainbow as required. Before mergeing the two layers I selected the part of the water which "reflects" the 'bow, feathered the selection and applied the Ocean Ripple Filter.

Finally I adjusted the saturation of the foreground water using the mask I rendered in Bryce.