Software magic

 A few weeks ago I bought the Nik Creative Collection of software when it was offered at a special price.It is a very impressive tool - particularly Silver EFX which converts colour photos into black and white.At the time I made myself promise that I would not start over- filtering photos so that they ended up with the same weird looks as all those photos being posted on Flickr and blogs by people who also have the Nik Collection.
However boys being boys I could not help myself and I have been playing with the filters and in one of my trials I converted what started as a pleasant photo taken in a monastery in Myanmar into something which I believe is slightly mystical -see below.For those interested in the technicalities it was taken on the Leica X1 as a DNG file -- converted in Color EFX using a bleach bypass filter and then given a light HDR treatment in the Nik HDR module and then tweaked in Lightroom 4.Not exactly a straight photo I know but hopefully you agree that it has a certain charm and an almost 3D quality.
And talking of software magic if you have not already seen it take a look at  Animation extraordinaire it really is magical and worth giving up 5 mins time for.Make sure that you view it on a big monitor screen and not on a tablet or phone.