One Photo Focus: March 2016

I was asked by Stacy Fischer at Visual Venturing to provide an image for the March 2016 One Photo Focus challenge. The image I picked is this one of the north stairs of the Adams Memorial Theatre at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

The theatre sits on the Southern Utah University campus in Cedar City, Utah, and opened in 1977. It is one of the most accurate replicas of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the world (at least the back and main stage areas). This last summer (2015) was the last year that plays will be staged at this theatre. The festival is building a new theater to replace this one, so this last summer was a bit nostalgic for festival goers.

For my edit, I first opened the RAW image in Photoshop’s RAW converter and used the following settings:

With these settings, I got this image:

Next, I added the following two duplicate background layers, each with a layer mask:

Soft Light blending mode
Multiply blending mode

On the Multiply layer, I added a Gaussian Blur at 15.0%. All of this created this image:

Next, I used a soft brush set at 100% opacity and in the layer mask of the Multiply layer mask, erased the theatre sign. I then set the Opacity of the SoftLight layer to 55%.