There's nothing particularly interesting about this photo except the slender branch-less tree that bisects the frame. Well, that and I appear to be holding a wand of some kind. I selected the area to the right of the branch and added a few filters to make it look as though that side of the picture represented a portal or gateway to another dimension. Some experiments, needless to say, are more successful than others.
Those wave and ripple filters are very difficult to use. They're a holdover from the early Photoshops before bump maps. I am very impressed that you got a result that reads like a mystic gate.
ReplyDeleteOne trick that I learned is to combine the wave filter with the difference cloud renderer - and difference clouds are even older than wave and ripple. However, if you use a difference cloud as a screen or a multiply or something, then you get an effect like dappled light. Be sure to use greyscale, and use a certain amount of motion blur to make the clouds look more like dappled shadows. You have to be fussy with the amplitudes of the waves you generate, but the time spent playing with those sliders can help you create some high-end effects. There are some tutorials online for this, if you search.
Another thing you could try is solarize, and/or goof with the curves. Finally, re-rendering the portal using a perspective or distort transform would make it look less flat. Also, you could experiment with manually adding some dodge and burn to make a wider range of values.