A Golden Snow on a Clock Tower

If you have ever been to Edinburgh, Scotland, you will probably recognize the historic Balmoral Hotel and Clock Tower that is near the Train Station (since 1902 the clock is set 3 minutes fast so people do not miss their trains). I was just playing around with the image thinking it might make a nice black and white image when I can up with this result. Started with a rather vintage looking preset from my LR 4 days. It gave that really nice warm feel that looked nice. Then it was cropped and Lucis Pro (no longer available) was applied to overall sharpen the image – it was way overdone. Not sure why I tried this, but I set the layer to Divide blend mode and got all this wonderful snow on the shadow side of the tower! A black layer mask was added to hide most of the effect and just painted in the white snow areas. The layer was then set to 92% layer opacity to let some of the sharpness show through. On a New Layer a particle brush created from Corey Barker’s video called Corey’s Universal Particle Brush was used to add the falling snow effect and set to 59% layer opacity. It looked pretty nice just this way. On a stamped layer (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E), Topaz (see sidebar for website link) ReStyle – one of my very favorite Topaz filters – was opened and this is basically what it looked like by using the Peat and Rock preset. This is why I love this filter – you always get some interesting results you had not thought of trying. It has not been incorporated with their Topaz Studio interface yet. Next used the Matt K vignette technique (see my How to Create a Subtle Vignette blog) to create a soft vignette effect. I kind of like the illustrative look created by using the Divide blend mode on this image. Lots of fun here!…..Digital Lady Syd