Cliff of Sand and processing

Had an opportunity the other day to go to the west coast of Denmark and take my new SONY NEX 5N for a spin. Must say I'm pretty impressed from what I've seen until now. The heavy aliasing seen in SONY NEX VG10 footage seems drastically reduced - to the point where I couldn't really spot any annoying aliasing artifacts of the landscape footage I shot this weekend. From what I've seen until now I'm very impressed by what this little beast can capture and render.

Anyway, below is a still taken with the NEX 5N, with the processing involved in it. The texture I used below is from flickr user borealnz and available here.

- First I did some minor curves adjustments in Photoshop Raw and increased the clarity a bit before importing to Photoshop.
- Cropped the 3:2 image to a ratio of 1:1,618 tweaking the composition a bit.
- Duplicated the base layer, denoised a bit without reducing the sharpness in contrasting areas and applied the high pass filter. The layer was then set to overlay @ 47% opacity.
- New curves adjustment layer. A very slight S curve on the red and green channels and pulled the white output down to about 230 and black output up to about 8 on the blue channel.
- New dark blue solid fill at blending mode exclusion and 10%.
- New gradient map with default black and white set at softlight 61%.
- New Black & White adjustment layer tweaked to bring the tones of the sand ranging from soft, bright tones toward the bottom of the picture to the dark black shadows in the cracks on the cliff of sand. Set to Divide at 8%.
- Flattened the image.
- Duplicated the image and applied Add Noise filter at 400% Gaussian monochromatic. Blurred this with Gaussian blur set to a radius of 1,5. Set the layer to overlay @ 61% opacity.
- Added the texture PB-cream from borealnz, and set it to darken @ 30%. This also served to control the luminance and tones of the water in a nice way.

And that was that.