Before/After "frozen lake" and "waiting for the light of day"

Due to the fact that it has been a long time since my last Before/After I decided to publish to at the same time to show you the most interesting ones of the last time in one post.

Frozen Lake

The first one is "frozen lake". It received the biggest feedback in the shortest time ever.
There were more than 100 faves at the first day and more than 500 views.
Some people also asked me for a before/after and this is why I post this one though I know that there decayed some time between posting the image and this post. I think there will be some visitors in the future who are happy to see what I did it from.



In my opinion the magic of this image lies in the misty trees in the background.
They give a depth to this image which wouldnt be there without them.
They were also the hardest part in postprocessing. It is not a big deal to convert an image into B/W but it is hard to get every single part of an image perfectly exposed and postprocessed. I used many different curves and masks to get every part right. At the end I was very happy with the result.

Waiting for the light of day

This is one other, very time-consuming postprocessing artwork.
I took this yesterday on my way back home. It was freezing cold so I tried to shoot as short as possible. This is why I only had about 15 shots from which I had to decide which one I want to use.
During the retouching I tried out many different tones, styles and colors but wasnt really convinced by one of them. After a hour I got this green style which I liked most. But the image wasnt really as good as I wanted it to be. What I did was adding a texture which brought the effect I hoped.
I think I will add these textures to the list of things that I try out when working on an image and maybe there will be some more texture works in my stream soon.

BTW: Does anyone of you have got experience with sites just like Imagekind? I would like to use something like that in the future but I am not sure which one is the best. please give me your personal experiences and opinions either as a comment here or a mail on flickr! Thanks in advance