Continuing on my quest to discover new editing techniques, I give you the above photo. This photograph was taken this past July in Denver, Colorado, near Larimer Square. My first step was to run the image through a plugin that simulates an HDR look, which allowed me to have slightly surreal lighting in the photo. From there, I warmed the image slightly (though I edited the image on my laptop, which has a much cooler display than what I’m used to on my iMac), then ran it through the auto-paint feature in Corel Painter X. Though much of my previous experimentation with Painter X focused on using the “painted” image as an accent, I really made it the main focus of this photograph. After the auto-painting was complete, I layered it on top of the faux-HDR image in Photoshop. From there, I adjusted the opacity of the “painted” layer, and made it slightly more transparent in the center to give the scene some depth. And there you have it! Now, if only the cafe in the image was authentic and not a Starbucks…