What looked like a dull and boring photo, to me, appeared to be worth tweaking in Photoshop CS. First I cropped the photo and removed an ungly pedestal. I copied the main stature and put in into an upper layer. Next, I used the brush too to add daps of yellow and orange to the background which I put through a combination of gausian blur, texture and motion blur. To add a little extra depth, I added a third layer under the statue but over the background, where I inserted a diagonal red gradient with fading opacity. Now, to the stature itself. First I removed some dark areas with CS's new shadow / highlight too. Brightened it up with auto levels and contrast tools. Brought out some additional browns and oranges using the hue / saturation too. and finally sharpened the figure with usm (unsharp mask) and edge sharpening. Now that the basics are done, I flattened the image and created the frame with the following procedure. First I used the stroke command to but a black line round the photo. Second and increased the canvas to put a bold white frame around the picture. Third, I created a second layer to put a stroked black frame around the photo with a little outer glow shadowing to create a little additional depth.


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