A Surreal New York New York Hotel

Not sure what possessed me to create this, but it was a lot of fun. This is not really a hard effect to achieve. Just made some basic Lightroom adjustments so my image had nice tones and detail. In Photoshop, added a little Lucis Pro (no longer available) to sharpen it just a little more – could have used Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Detail or Clarity to do this. Had to do quite a bit of clean up since there is there is a roller coaster running in front of the New York New York Hotel in Las Vegas. On a stamped layer (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E), added a pretty severe motion blur by going to Filter -> Blur -> Motion Bur and setting the Angle to -90 (vertical effect for this image) and the Distance to 687. Added a duplicate layer of the Lucis Pro layer on top of the blur layer and a Black Layer Mask – the buildings were lightly painted back to give some building effect but still left it really vague. Another stamped layer was used and the now free Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 was opened. Started with a preset and tweaked the sliders to get a pleasing effect. On a duplicate layer, the Flaming Pear Flood filter was added that gave a bit more of an eerie look – the lines in the bottom foreground came by selecting a Glue called spin light – thought it was an interesting effect. On another stamped layer used Topaz Texture Effects 2 using the Crisp Morning Run – did a lot of adjustments and used the Spot Mask a couple times, once on the Texture section and another in the Masking section. Added a Red Channel Luminosity Curve Adjustment Layer. On another stamped layer above used Nik Viveza 2 to add focus to the guitar on the building. Used a Selective Color Adjustment Layer to give that final color look to get the sort of soft abstract effect. This was a lot of fun to try something different……Digital Lady Syd