Yet another attempt to get people interested in posting their retouching mysteries for us to solve.

Here's a very nice street scene by Bart Groenhuizen. I've had my way with it, and your task is to figure out and replicate what I did.

Hint: I did not use any adjustments at all.

(oh, and mine is the second one)

I should add that you can dl the original here:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/787339

And if you enjoyed trying to solve this retouching mystery, do an advanced search for "detective" in topic only to find the others.

any masks used?

You tell me, you're the detective :)

These are so fun, Doug. Not sure what you mean that you didn't make any adjustments. Hopefully you'll explain that statement some.

What I did was divi up the shot into 3: (1) the facade on the left, (2) the facade in back and (3) the facade on the right with the road. On (1) I used an overlay blend and kicked up the contrast. (2) was left alone. (3) got a xero radiance application followed by a diffuse glow.

Somehow, I doubt that's even close to what you did. But the result is, IMO, quite similar.

"adjustments" would be anything from the Adjustments menu or adjustment layers (for non Photoshop users, that would be contrast, curves, levels, hue/sat, color correction, etc.)

I don't have PhotoShop, but if that's what you meant then I've failed, as I did use (probably) all those adjustments to one degree or another. Oh well ;(

Oh, anyway, even though I blew it, I'm pretty convinced that you also cut up the image into 3, then probably applied plugin effects on each to get to your result.

I did use gaussian blur, but no other plugins.

hi Doug
I duplicated the layer 2 times one I set the blend mode to screen and the other to hard light, I hit one of the those layers with a Gaussian blur of 2.
then i tweaked the colors with an selective color adjustment layer. Used some dodge on the left hand side to brighten it up.

Guesses are so close that I feel guilty not just telling the ending. So here it is:

Duplicated background layer, applied gaussian blur, set blending mode to Linear Light, and masked everything but the pavement
Duplicated pavement layer, set blending mode to color dodge, and masked everything but the left building
Duplicated pavement layer again, set blending mode to vivid light, and masked everything but the right building.

46462

And, as an added bonus, I've attached my favorite version, which I thought would just be unfair to make you guess about, which added an unmasked dupe of the background layer, set to saturation blending mode.

46463

Now it's YOUR turn to post a mystery. Just make sure you know the answer, and put "Retouching Detective" in the title.