Assessment 1 - Mountains and Lake

My second image I had already taken, this was of some Mountains and a lake. Below is the image.

This image stuck with my landscape theme.

This photo was taken just before sunset, there is a clear sun spot in the left of the picture as shown on the left. I need to remove this spot, in order to do this I used the clone tool to clone the mountains over the sun spot.
I decided that the mountains needed to stand out more and was a bit dull from the sun. I right clicked on my background layer and then selected "Duplicate layer..." as shown on the right. By doing this copied the background and made "layer 1". With this layer I only wanted the mountains so I selected layer 1 on the layers tab on the right, then selected the "eraser tool". I only wanted to remove everything below the mountains so in order to make sure I wasn't left with sharp edges, I choice a soft round brush. Then I needed to change the colour of the image, to do this I clicked on "Image" then "Adjustments" and finally "colour balance". I played with the colours in till I found a image which made the mountains stand out. I was left with a layer which looked like the one below.

I took the background layer and removed the mountains again by using a soft round brush, and by placing the background layer on top of layer 1, I merged the two layers together. After touching up the edges, playing with the brightness and contrast to gain best results, my image was finished.


The image has been posted on Big Stock Photo and is awaiting approval,
The keywords and categories the image comes under are:

Keywords:

beautiful, blue, freedom, grass, heaven, lake, mountains, natural, nature, pattern, perspective, sky, trees, water, snow, rocks, sunset, landscape, new, zealand" "south, island" Zealand

Categories:

Landscapes > Mountains
Nature > Skies

File Format:: The file format I chose for this image is a JPEG, reasons are the same as the previous image.