Christmas in Yosemite

Merry Christmas everyone. This is a sunrise shot in Yosemite National Park in California. I added the ornaments and the lights, obviously. The ornaments were added with a simple cut and paste technique in Photoshop, but I added the lights using the blend mode 'lighten' found in the pulldown submenu in the layers palette. This tool eliminated the dark background surrounding the lights, and that made it very easy to make this composite. I simply mde a rough selection of the lights that were decorating another tree using the lasso tool, copied that to the clipboard, and then pasted the selection onto the snowy tree. I used 'lighten', and then I made a layer mask so I could brush away the unwanted lights with the brush tool.