David, Issabella, Wallace & Anmal - excellent work all, especially the variations on the monument and sky/hills background photo.

Time for me to enter the game.
Below my results on all Issa's images.

First triplet

Second triplet

Third triplet

Fourth triplet

Fifth triplet

Sixth triplet

Last ones

Thank you so much Dinasset. Excellent results too. Both of you are great Masters in Photography.

OMG. Thank you for the kind words.
Wallace. The purple bull is a good, fun image!
AnMal. I like your interpretation of the border post - I only experimented with the background.
CtrlAltDel & dinnasset. Good to see you join the game.

david.

I did some thread archeaology to find an inspiring photo to play with and found Grand duchess Anastasia here.
This is my take on her. First, I used some gaussian blur and smudge on a duplicate layer, then I Layer masked to get just the parts I wanted blurred and smudged. I've used some unsharp masking and anisotropic smoothing too, on duplicate layers with layer masks to just get the parts I wanted. I wanted some colour on the dress but should have kept it all white because the pearl and embroidery details were a nightmare to mas off. The hair is the wrong colourbut I had problems getting it darker and keeping the details. I've never heard what colour eyes she was supposed to have, but a description of her mother said greyish blue eyes, so I've tried for that.

AnMal,
A superb job on Grand Duchess Anastasia!!! The pearls and embroidery are a nightmare to mask - I struggled on my version.
david.

david: Thank you! I much prefer the darker hair in your take, and I think you made a better choice keeping the dress one colour.

Here are some of the billion or so phrotos I took while Erisian and I were on our honeymoon three years ago. I haven't got round to editing all - or even most - of them yet, but it would be fun to see someone else take them on. Oh, and I've put them in thumbnails as this thread is already a bit heavy for me to load on our slow connection. In case you didn't know, you just right click -> view image and you get the full size version.

AnMal,
A very quick try at your three photographs. However, a little difficult as the originals are in indexed mode and therefore don't possess a full colour spectrum.
david.

My tries.

david & dinasset: Nice job! You've really made the colour of the water come out in that last one, david, that's what it looked like for real. Dinasset, yours are very dramatic, a lot like the Cornwall coast. Makes me nostalgic .

Hmm. I had problems uploading these images because of their weight. I made jpg copies, thinking I could upload those, but they simply looked horrible, nothing like the originals. I didn't know what the save for web function actually does, but by what David says it seems they get indexed, losing colour info. What would the rest of you do? How do you go about uploading your photos without pulling them down to bad quality?

AnMal,
I usually just export photographs to .jpg. Occasionally I have had to reduce the quality setting slightly to get below the limit for uploading files.
When I had a slow internet connection, I would generally reduce the longest dimension to about 2000 pixels before exporting.
david.

david: Thanks, I'll see if I can't get those uploaded in better quality - though turning them into jpg just seemed to kill them. Maybe I could tweak the settings.