OK, I’ll come straight out and admit that the title is a blatant pun, please forgive me!
Last Sunday I took a picture of a rather nice coat of arms on a lovely old Victorian bridge in Leeds. It was taken on a grey overcast morning, with little light or vibrancy about it. So when I got it to the computer, I had the urge to do some tweaking. First, here’s the original shot:

The colours were a little worn and faded. I wonder what would happen if I tried to beef them up a bit? So I used the original colour layer in my Photoshop document, duplicated it and changed the blending mode of the top layer to be 100% Soft Light instead of Normal. I often play about with duplicate layers and alternative blending modes as I find this can give some very pleasing results:

I liked this better, but still wasn’t happy. Then I had the idea of presenting the image with a more olde-worlde feel. I thought I could make it appear like an old sepia postcard which had a little bit of hand colouring applied. So I tried the Nik Silver Efex Pro “Antique Plate I” filter, which gave me the following base sepia layer:

This sepia layer sits between my original layer and the Soft Light version to give me the final result – which achieved exactly the effect I was aiming for:

This seemed to go rather well with the subject matter, and I’m pleased it worked out for Day #1161‘s image.