Now to try and remember what I did on this one…  I think the composition and expression was pretty good but it did look a little flat.  The option to go black and white was there but that lovely gold tone was too good to lose!  So, I took it into Nik Color Efex Pro 4 – extract details filter and then tweaked the levels slightly in Photoshop.

I do like to use the Art History brush to create the “painting look” but it takes ages!  So, I took it into Alien Skin Software’s Snap Art 3 (watercolour filter), adjusted the canvas and reduced the brush size.  The result was nice enough but I lost a little too much detail for my liking.  Next I duplicated the layer and applied a High Pass filter to the image, finally using a mask; I painted only those bits of sharpening in that I wanted.   By the way blending mode was to “darken” not my usual “High Light” mode.Now to get this one printed….

Contact me through my blog if you’re interested in high-resolution versions of any of my photos.

These tools helped me work the magic:

• Adobe Photoshop CS5
• Canon 7D
• Alien Skin Software Snap Art 3
• Nik Software Color Efex Pro 4
• Canon 70-200mm f4 lens