Making of Forest Walk - Applying textures and adding a glow effect - Update 2019

Hello,
today I want to share how I processed an image that turned out to be quite nice, but on a second  look felt not good regarding its composition.

Here is the result that I like, but somehow knew wouldn't work

Forest Walk

The Processing

I used one of my Lightroom presets to do the basic processing. I usually tweak this preset to adapt it to the image.

unprocessed Original

I decided to apply what is called the  "Orton-effect" to get a dreamy soft glow. You can find my tutorial on this technique here--> How to create the Orton Effect 

However I am going to introduce a variation on this technique, that works equally well. Instead of over exposing a copy of the original I set a copy of the image to 50% Screen, that brightened the image while still keeping the Orton glow. With an original size of 6000px x 4000px a gaussian Blur setting of 60 to 90px is necessary to achieve the effect. I settled at 75px. Please take a look at the Layers copy.

Orton effect - before/after  - please move over the image to see the difference

I liked the overall tones and chose to apply  only two textures to achieve a subtle canvas texture effect

The green texture added additional green hues and made the image darker. I decided to lighten the image by adding a lighter more neutral texture and achieved this with blend mode "overlay". 

Take a look at the textures WHITEWALLS  and FLUTTER on my site.

Though I liked the processing, I wasn't satisfied with the image as a whole. Yesterday I came up with two different crops. Thus making two images out of one.

1. the one with the path as leading line

and 2. the part on the left, where the light is breaking through

What do you think? Do you sometimes face similar problems with your photos?

You'll fin my textures here--> TEXTURE PACKS

Thanks for your attention!