Silver Round the Tree

"Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the greenwitch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree."

-from "The Dark is Rising" sequence, by Susan Cooper

Off to Lithgow again today - so of course here's a tree in a field. Black & white, as (for whatever reason) my thing for trees in fields is especially for B&W trees in fields.

Dunno.

Anyway, before the B&W conversion (with my usual RGB filters, plus sharpening, an overlay layer, and slightly pulled-down luminance curve) I added a 'screen' layer with a gradient to affect pretty much only the grass and distant trees, and then painted the mask onto the main bits of the foreground tree. With that all a bit lightened, but not over-lightening the sky, I did the B&W conversion. Then I cooled the white balance to give it the silvery look, and cropped to 3:2, taking out a bit of sky, thereby raising the horizon.

Do embiggen - it's more better.

Unprocessed version is here.