A Mermaid in the Mist of a Fountain

This is another image of part of the interesting Fountain at Linthlithgow Palace in Scotland (where Mary, Queen of Scots was born). The fountain was built in 1538 by James V – it has been known to flow with wine on a few occasions. These colors came from the image itself so I imagine at some time it was quite beautiful. I found the mermaid a rather interesting character in the mist of all the other statues. (See my previous Deer on a Fountain blog.) In Lightroom applied the new Artistic 04 profile that comes with LR/ACR, cropped the image, and did a few basic slider adjustments. In Photoshop duplicated the background layer and opened up Luminar 2018 (see sidebar for website link) where the AI Filter, Brilliance and Warmth, and Image Radiance filters were applied. The background was duplicated again and a Gaussian Blur set to 4.0 was applied to soften the stone in the palace which was very distracting behind the fountain. A layer mask was added to the Luminar layer and the background was painted out so the blur layer shows through. A 50% gray dodge and burn layer was also used to help emphasize the figures. A stamped layer was created and Nik Viveza 2 was used to direct attention to the mermaid. Last step involved adding a spotlight effect on the mermaid using a large white brush at 9% Flow on an Overlay blend mode layer. That was it. Would love to go back and take some more pics!…..Digital Lady Syd