Skywatch Friday

A few days ago I was in Neosho, Missouri photographing some of the downtown architecture. The sky was crystal clear blue and obviously not very interesting. I was intrigued by this stone work so I captured a rather mundane image, but I love the craftsmanship that is on display here.
Once I got home I cropped the image and added a little color saturation. Here are the results.

Now the mason's craft is really on display. I love this detail and it is repeated several times along this exterior wall. That was fun, now let's see what happens when I add a special filter preset.

Recently On1 photo editing software released a set of 10 filters for free. Previously Google had released the entire Nik collection of filters to the public for free. For those of us who have almost as much fun editing the images as we did capturing them, it just doesn't get any better than free filters for your PhotoShop Elements software. This filter is called "Tin Type Dirty". I have strengthened the details a little and reduced the opacity just a bit. It's funny, if you found a photo that looked like this, you would probably scan it, and try to restore it to like new condition. When you have a perfectly good image you take it out and play in the mud. We humans are strange like that. Have a blessed week-end.