I was in Waltham this morning for a vendor meeting and decided to grab my Photo-a-Day shot here instead of in RI. This abandoned armory caught my eye quite by accident. It turns out it was built in 1908 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. I couldn't find any details about the usage other than having been an armory for "Company F".
As you can see, I decided to play a bit with the post processing. There was a great deal of shadow in the original image, so I ran it through Redynamix - my HDR plug-in. I then turned it into a black and white using a gradient map. Now, to add some damaged edges, I used a cookie cutter tool using the jagged edges crop that you see here. A dark brown layer was placed under it, which, with the gradient map, produced the black outline. From there, I layered an interesting black, brown, and red texture on top, using a hard light blend mode at 87% opacity. I adjusted the levels a bit, and then lowered the saturation to pull out most of the color from the texture. The uppermost layer was a deep blue photo filter.
@allisonrap Allison, I primarily use Photoshop Elements 10, but I have several plug-ins that are also used extensively. Topaz Adjust 5, Redynamix, Color Color, and Neat Image are all PSE plug-ins that I use quite often.
@allisonrap There really are a lot of options out there. I went with PSE since there are a ton of tutorials and plug-ins available for it, and I found it somewhat intuitive to use. Most of them have demo versions you can try before buying, at least, so you can see what works best for you before you have to shell out some cash.
