I wanted to grab a shot of this roadside farm stand before the field was planted, and today seemed as good a day as any to do it. The problem is, I really didn't know what I wanted to do with it after I shot it. I took a number of shots from different angles, but this off-season sign for fire wood (propped up by a large rock) was the one I liked the best. You may notice the barn in the background since it was a subject about a month ago.
I played around with a ton of different post processing techniques. What I settled on was produced using a couple of different filters in Topaz Adjust. The first was a standard photo pop filter. That brought out the colors a bit. Then I ran that through the spicefy filter, which gives it a real garish look. I then ran that layer through the find edges filter in Photoshop and blended it with the photo pop layer using a soft light blend mode. A canvas background texture was added. A warming filter was added to everything except the sign, and the levels of the sign and everything else were adjusted separately. It was an interesting session, and I did learn a bit about playing with different filters in different layers, so that was worthwhile. Even at f2.8, the depth of field did not blur to the background as much as I wanted, though, so I may need to try a similar shot with a much longer focus lens.
