My Favorite Building

The Dayton Daily News building.

I visited Dayton, Ohio in 2018 and 2020; both times I took photos of this building. The two scarred sides show that there were other attached structures that have been torn down, and this single building--sitting all alone on a corner--has lasted.

I had enough photos to cover all four sides. I found some public domain music that fit. A Youtube video explained how the music can inform the editing. After that, it was plonking everything together and seeing how it worked.

My Favorite Building @ Vimeo

The process:

Load a photo and crop it to the final size. Duplicate it.

One copy is for color. Tweak the saturation, blur the image, and change to Index mode with limited colors; this merges all the little spots of color into blobs.

The other layer is for lines. Make it grayscale and sharpen it if necessary. Edge detection creates the lines and these can be adjusted with contrast.

Put the Lines layer above the Color layer, and set it to Multiply. That's it!

Well, that's the basic process. The tricky part is making it look good and that requires a lot of adjusting everything because no two photos are alike. If something doesn't like right, just duplicate one of the layers and try something else.