In the past, summer has not been my favorite tree season. It seemed all the good stuff, those amazing lines, were covered by leaves. So I ignored the trees for the summer and played with other subjects.

This year, I challenged myself to create some summer Treescapes. Could I get to a similar style and feel with blue skies and trees with leaves? After playing around with them for several weeks, I’m figuring it out.

I’ve discovered that in the summer, the Treescapes are more about the light and the leaves than the lines. Maybe that was the key.

This image, Morning’s Gift, is a good example of what I mean. There is that gorgeous morning light, coming through and illuminating the leaves. There is the feeling that the sky is just lightening, the day is just beginning, and it’s going to be a good one. That’s what I wanted to highlight. Let’s go through how I achieved this result.

Starting with this image, from an early morning walk:

I wanted to shift the color a bit, so I pulled it into Mextures, an app I’ve had for a while that I recently rediscovered. They have added lots of new effects! Not only does it have good effects, it’s highly customizable. You can control the amount of the effect, rotate it, change the blending mode and then add more layers. Fun! Leaving the app the image had two Radiance filters and a Grunge texture applied:

Now that I had some nice color shifts going, I wanted to mess it up a bit with an artistic filter. I used the “Benson” effect in Autopainter, one of my go-to effects:

As I started to blend this version back with the original, I found it was getting too dark. I was losing the light. So I pulled the original into Snapseed and lightened it a bit:

And then blended with the Autopainter output, in Image Blender:

It’s getting there! But I wanted mor depth, and depth often comes with more layers. I started playing with it in Distressed FX, and found I liked how this filter warmed it up:

This version and the previous version were blended again in Image Blender:

I’m liking the color, the depth and the way the light comes through at this point. There’s just one tiny problem, some distracting leaves along the top edge. So, back into Snapseed for a little crop:

And it’s done!

You see what I mean about Summer Treescapes? They are all about the light and the leaves. That was the key.