We went to a neighborhood composed of houses of what seemed like a group of relatives engaged in a lot of livelihood. They have a brass factory, a mango processing business, etc. This old woman was drying up the processed mango. Nearby was a brass factory where soldering and melting were done, thus the smoke was a bit thick. The effect, in my opinion, was very nice.

But I didn't stay long because the smoke was too much for my eyes to handle. (But yes, I had a lot of shots there. So expect more pictures to be posted by me from this setting.)

(Auto-levels and cropping)

I have my own sharpen script that I run through Pshop regardless of the pic quality, it has always improved the image :

- USM : effect 18, radius 40, threshold 0

- USM : effect 150 radius 0.3, threshold 0

- edit/fade USM, 100%, darken blend mode,

- USM : effect 150 radius 0.3, threshold 0

- edit/fade USM, 50%, brighten blend mode.

Save it at once and run it every time you want!



- I applied my script to your pic, reult was much more brilliant red colors,

- then cropped what I could on the right side and balanced the format with a slight top cropping,

- pulled slight the bootom of the curves to beef the contrast up in the darker tones.

framed, et voilà...

This is the original picture, only resized. I guess the "artifacts" that was in the posted version came from Unsharp Masking. I wasn't even aware of it 'til it was pointed out.