Back in 2007 shot with the K110D and DA16-45 in a narrow street in Differedange, Luxembourg. I couldn't step back far enough to avoid converging verticals nor get in front of the house so the horizontals didn't do well either. It seemed a dull shot at the time:
In April, when Darktable 3.0.2 was released I was trying to throw some images at its auto-keystone module and ended up redoing the image from scratch. Final tweak was a bit of work with GMIC's photoillustration filter and a bit of spotting. I ended up with this:
Then on to this interior shot of the observation tower of the Afsluitdijk, a major dam and causeway in the Netherlands:
While playing around with the image I ended up with something that reminded me of an Egyptian mask. Carefull aligning and mirrorring in Gimp after which I decided to oversharpen and oversaturate the colors a bit:
This image I shot in the lobby of a London hotel while on a business trip. The weather was pretty awful and going for a walk just didn't seem like a smart move. I was just sitting on a sofa and looking up (bored out of my skull) and shot up through the glass ceiling. This was shot on a GR (I hope that's OK in this thread) and of course I couldn't line everything up so distortion and crooked lines ruined the image for me and the colors seemed dull and uninteresting.
The appeal of the image only came to me much, much later when I managed to straighten out the lines properly, get rid of some small image elements which distracted from the overall feel. I also emphasized the deep blue color and tried to get the raindrops to stand out more by an extra masked sharpening layer in Gimp.
And an example of GMIC's sketch filter, applied on a layer in Gimp: