Make it Better Monday

Here are the results of my fiddling with a photo that needs improvement once a week

 

The original  photo as you can see was way too dark in the dark areas and too light in the light areas .
Camera Raw took care of some of that - I recovered some of the light areas and lightened up the darker areas -
then I ran it through Topaz adjust 5 increasing the adaptive exposure to .21 and range to 45.I started with one of the HDR Presets but made significant changes to the settings. While the result is quite faux HDR looking it really does much better reflect the image I remember.
At that point I decided to remove the rope that runs diagonally down the photo from top left to the middle bottom ( I know very dangerous for the people yet to cross the bridge!!) - I used a combination of the spot healing brush set to content aware and content aware fill . I also did some tree trimming using the spot healing brush of the branch in the foreground on the right which crosses the bottom of the bridge.
The colour of the water is truly the colour that it was - quite a vibrant turquoise which really didnt show up too well in the top photo which really suffered from such a wide range of contrast in the scene.

 

Here is the layout I created with my newly improved photo.’

 

To create this layout I used pieces from my Antipodes Adventure Page kit and others