A walk through the post processing of a calm and cold winter morning image is perhaps right for this time of the year.
This is 5 minutes away from my home, half way to my school. There are still cobblestones in the streets like in the 1870s, when this quarter of the city was developed. This is a lucky accident because this area got not much bombs in WWII and was left alone as an area for the expansion of the inner city after the war. So houses were cheap and got bought by young families with mostly intellectual background. As the planners were ready to build their high rises and 4 lane streets the people made such a fuss that the plans were scrapped.
I changed the mood of the image by combining two different outputs from UFRaw. One with “cold” colour temperature for the sky, the other warmer for the street. Then I combined both as two layers in one image, rotated both layers, added a layer mask for revealing the street in the lower layer, cloned away an ugly reflection or colour artefact, resized and sharpened with USM.
So nothing really new. 
You can get the files for this episode on the download page.
The TOC
00:23 Welcome
00:30 The original image
01:50 The objective
02:40 Altering the colour balance in UFRaw
08:00 Combine the images in Gimp as layers
09:19 Rotating the two layers
11:52 Cropping
14:06 Add a layer mask and edit it
20:30 Fine-tuning the layer mask
22:20 Use clone tool to remove unwanted features
24:30 Extra edits
26:45 Re-size for the web
28:00 Sharpen using Unsharp mask
28:52 Frohe Weihnachten
29:44 the End
