How can I do this effect?

Hi!

I want to take a photo of a tree like this and do a similar gradient/grainy effect as the one in this . Any idea how I can do it?

Thank you!
Mr. Newb.

Hi maff. Welcome! To be honest, I doubt that there's any type of effect added to the second tree. It simply looks like a photo of a tree that's been desaturated and reduced to one color. The only difference between the two trees (besides the use of green instead of black - an easy enough task in PS) is that the lower tree has a lot more highlights, which simply show up as white.

To do this yourself, take a pic of your tree in plenty of sunlight, perferably when the sun is overhead. If you have to extract the tree, and have it alone in the image like the trees above, I'd recommend shooting the tree against a clear sky. That'll make life much much easier when you have to mask out the tree from the background. Once this is done, go to Image > Image Adjustments > Desaturate, and then go back into Image Adjustments > Curves and move the two arrows at the bottom of the curves graph towards each other, playing around with them until you get a look that you like.

All they did was take the image of the tree and apply a very subtle emboss.

For you to do this, you need to take the image of the tree you want and remove any unnecessary background. In doing so, you should have nothing but your tree and a transparent background. You can then apply the appropriate blending options to achieve the effect.