Ominous Sky

It's day 3 of Horrordailies and I'm still here!

Today's tutorial, recorded 15 years ago, changes an image from a bright day to more ominous skies.

I started with this picture, which is ominous enough even with a blue sky:

(Some houses burned down near my neighborhood.)

And I ended up with this:

I practiced using the fuzzy select tool, which I haven't really used before, so that was good.

As usual, I changed a few things...

• Getting the blue background out of leafy trees is nearly impossible, so I just wiped most of them out. The tree I left in probably should have come out as well since I tried to reconstruct it and failed.
• I didn't have an orange sky image, so I used a gradient. That was mostly successful.
• I didn't have a cloud image, so I used solid noise. It was a little less successful.

The whole thing turned out a little too dark, but that might partially be a problem with the original image. It definitely does make the whole thing kind of spooky, though, so I'll count it as a win.

Other things I did today

Foster kitten Bagheeri went from snotty-but-active yesterday to more-snotty-and-sleeping today, so she had a quick recheck at the shelter. She's on slightly different antibiotics. Fingers crossed she bounces back quickly.

I formatted and loaded the Dragon Fortune ebook to all the retailers. It would be nice if that stemmed the tide of "You only have X days to load your manuscript!" emails, but they send them whether you have a file loaded or not. Anyhow, October 14th! https://books.tmbaumgartner.com/DragonFortune