What does one do with a photograph of a historic cemetery overlooking a 17th Century stone-ender? Why, one turns it into a scene worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, of course! The house in the background is the Smith-Appleby House in Smithfield. It's one of the few remaining 17th Century historic homes in Rhode Island. The cemetery in the foreground belongs to the Smith family, and the stones I chose in this photo are all so weather worn as to be unreadable. They're the oldest stones in the cemetery and likely date back to the colonial period. I wanted to do something different with it, though, and I really had my heart set on some kind of spooky scene today, so hopefully the final result captures that mood.
For post processing, I used a medium detail filter in Topaz Adjust to produce the really harsh lines throughout the image. Two separate gradient maps were used. The first was a sea-green gradient in soft light blend mode, and then a black and white gradient in darken blend mode. I toned the saturation down a bit, and used a couple of levels adjustments to enhance the contrast a bit. Overall, I think I managed to capture the "something crawls out of here at night" mood.
