Winter is a desolate time. The trees are bare and the sun, during its brief winter day, shines on a forbidding landscape. That is the feeling that I tried to capture in this image.

Here we start with a fairly straightforward picture of some trees against the sun. Nothing special to see. What I will do sometimes to "punch up" an otherwise flat picture is to is to increase the contrast in the midrange tones.

For this picture, I did exactly the opposite. Only a very narrow midrange tones were selected, and they were then expanded to fill out the tonal range. This is similar to an effect called "posterization," where a limited number of tones (perhaps 32) is used. But here the effect is more subtle, with a wider range of tones.

There are many controls in photo editing programs, and we are told to use them to make the image as realistic as possible. But you can play with them to achieve far more interesting results. Next time you open a dialog box in your favorite photo editing program and see a bunch of controls, try all of them to see what sort of effects you can produce. Sometimes, moving a control the wrong way can produce a look for your picture that puts it into a new and more interesting realm.