As January comes to a close, I decided to take a trip back to the 17th Century. Today's photo is of the barn adjacent to the Smith-Appleby House in Smithfield. The house and barn date to 1696. I've found a great list of 17th century buildings in RI, and since I'm fascinated by that time period, you can expect to see a lot of shots from that list.
I went through several post processing techniques before settling on the black and white you see here. There is a fantastic texture in the barn itself, so there will most certainly be some color shots over the course of the year, but for now I really liked how the black and white version came out.
Topaz Adjust was used to improve the contrast and pull out the highlights a bit. That adjustment drew out a ton of dust marks, though, so I spent a bit of time cleaning that up with the spot healing tool. The very interesting texture - sort of a denim cloth with creases - was a texture overlay first with a 66% soft light blend mode, and then duplicated with a 100% multiply blend mode. I cut out a section of the multiply layer using a free-hand marquee and then feathered the cut 200 pixels. A blue photo filter was added to improve contrast, and a couple of levels adjustments in various places also added to the contrast effect. Finally, saturation was brought down to about 10% to leave the image you see before you.
