Parasol

@Jonathan (of the Japan Journal): I accomplished it by rolling the window down on the passenger side to avoid artifacts from reflections off the glass. Took about 8 shots total, and this was the one that seemed the best to me.

I spent about an hour and a half working on the layer mask that I used to isolate her from the original background. She got the standard levels and curves adjustments, together with a contrast adjustment layer. Then due to the lack of any color anywhere except the parasol, I cranked up the saturation by about 70 or so.

The background itself was very simple to do. In The GIMP I duplicated the layer and applied the same layer mask, but with black and white inverted so that the woman would not be affected and the background would. Then I just went into the filter menu and applied "plasma", desaturated that to black and white, then retinted it with a cyanotype gradient to turn it blue.

The hard part about something like this is just the drudge work of carefully creating the layer mask. Everything else is a breeze and only takes a few minutes.

@Daroru: Thanks a lot. I was trying to get something to set her off from the original background when I decided to see what sort of effects I could work up instead. Wanted something that would highlight the gold of the parasol. In the original photo, I thought the thing was white. Hell, I thought it was white when I took the picture.

@Dan: Thanks, Dan. GIMP rules! Does everything I could ever want to do with it, a ton of stuff I'll never figure out, and they give it away for free. What could be sweeter?

@Hal Shows: I would be glad to consider that. Contact me via e-mail and we can discuss it.