Evolution of an image

I was cleaning out my computer of a lot of old clutter and I came across the cloud image that I used to make the cloud theme for this blog. I thought I’d share with you how the image evolved.

First, we went for a walk back in October, and there was a glorious cloud in the north lit up by the sunset. I shot several pictures, thinking I could use it as a background. I ended up using one of those in the Cloud Calendar, and this one for the theme:

Well, it doesn’t look too good, huh? It’s not quite how it looked, so I adjusted the white balance and the contrast to get it closer to reality. I might have made it a little more dramatic than it was, but it looks much better:

Once I started experimenting with clouds as backgrounds, I realized that you couldn’t have both light and dark colors because then what do you use as a text color? You have to have a contrast with the text, or you can’t read it. So I chose one area of the picture that was fairly low-contrast:

Now it was a bit darker than I wanted for the feel of the blog. I brightened it and tweaked the color. The result is this smaller version of the background image used in the theme.

I think it works well. It’s amazing how many different ways you can use one image.