Colors in Photoshop & Mosaic Art

I used photoshop this week instead of gimp and I have to say I am a much happier person because of it! This is what i did this week:

This is all the same picture, but I wanted it to seem as if I had taken a picture in the summer, early fall, and late fall. To get these effects I played with the hues and saturations. I then selected the part with just the leaves and colorized it.

For this picture (the original is on the left) I was never very happy with it but for some reason
I keep coming back to it. I thought it would be fun to play with in photoshop. I played with the brightness and contrast, adding a lot of brightness and a bit of contrast. Then I added a lot of saturation and played with the hue bar until I was happy with the colors.

The original is on the left. I really like this picture, and i think the flowers are beautiful, but I wanted to see what i could do with it. First, I played with the vibrant button, and made it ALOT more vibrant. Then, I upped the saturation almost as much as possible, which really brought out the great colors in the flowers. Then, I decided to play with the hues and saturation again (my favorite tab, I think) and I came to this color combination of blue and red, which I found really fun to look at. I don't like photos that are obviously manipulated, I liek natural looking ones. But I thought this was too cool to not post to my blog.

And here is my mosaic: