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Happy Halloween
31 October 2020
With schools still closed here, we missed the annual parade of princesses, monsters, movie heroes, baseball players and other professionals (none of whom have to go to school anymore).
This year, with the pandemic raging again, the holiday is being left to the ghosts and goblins. Mainly, we suspect, the ghosts.
So we revisited an image of ghosts for the occasion. But in the spirit of this peculiar holiday (if you can call it that), we transformed it in our "laboratory."
No potions were needed. We did a straight conversion to black-and-white, dropped the exposure (in a day-for-night ploy), restored the highlights to their brighter tones and then copied the image to a new layer to apply a motion blur to suggest movement. Final touch was to set the Blending Mode to Lighten so only the wisps of ghostly movement showed up.
It felt like magic. We twirled our mustache and, in a low rumble, murmured, "Ah ha!"
Good thing there was no one around to see us. No one but these ghosts, that is.