An experimental image using multi-render matting.  I hope you enjoy it folks - this one took twice as long as usual. That's because it's actually constructed from two Vue renders and a bit of perhaps unobvious trickery.

I originally created the scene as a sunset silhouette, with the foliage and lake house almost completely black against a rich dark orange-yellow sky.  I liked the result, but regretting the loss of detail on the house (which I should have mentioned, like the pirogue, was a downloaded model), and simply altering the lighting destroyed the mood.

So I decided to try it as a daylight scene, going to some trouble to modify textures for such detail as algal growth creeping up the wooden piles, etc.  But in the end I wasn't satisfied with that either, as the colour balance was "off" to my eye and the mood of the image had completely altered.

So I finally came up with the idea shown at the top of this page - an almost monochrome grey image against a sunet sky.  This was achieved in Paint Shop Pro.  The two Vue renders were loaded into PSP as two layers of the same image.  Then to get the partly monochrome effect, the blend mode was set to either Luminance or Colour, the choice simply depending on which layer you have placed on top.  Thus the almost black parts of the sunset render effectively act as a mask and desaturate the colours of the daylight version to the point where they are just warm shades of grey, but retain the modelling and textural detail of the daylight render.  The stronger colours of the sunset sky became lighter and slightly more uniform in the process but still dominate the scene.