Sean's Bedgebury School

Sean asked if anyone would like to have a play around with this photo for processing and its such a fantastic scene I couldn't resist.
The original photo has great light and fantastic lines among other attributes.

-I used Photoshop CS3
-First thing I did was to straighten the bottom of the stairs, to give the lines nice well linear runs with the DCE Tools photoshop plugin.
-Second I made an adjustment layer copy of the original.
-Next I adjusted the curves until I had a high contrast high light, sorta mad looking scene.
-Next I took that layer and changed it to a mono b&w.
-Then I ran the lucis art plugin over it with sculpture, (same thing can be achieved with 'Shadows/Highlights' adjustment), and popped the detail a bit.
-I set the blending mode on the dup layer to 'hard light' and opacity to 39%.
-Blended them and that's it.

I think this would also do nicely with some selective blurring, maybe I'll have two plays :D