The “Y” stories voting block is live and running, and because we’ve been gone for so long, I plan a few extra reminders, this being the first (hence the title).

As usual, if you like a particular story, in addition to voting for it — and if you feel like it — forward it to friends and family. Ideally, they should read all three and make up their mind, but it’s OK if you sway them to your opinion . . . as long as they still vote.

No matter how one comes to the stories, if you’re a reader of our stories and someone who votes, thank you in advance for casting a vote for your favorite of the three. Links to the stories and the poll for voting for “Alphabet Challenge Y-Stories” are HERE(link). Votes will be accepted until  Noon (Central Time) on Monday, March 15th, 2021.

So, model plane . . . .

I’m going back to 2009 for this photo of a plane that has appeared numerous times on this blog. Normally, it’s shown sitting atop a post in the plaza right outside the Air Force Academy Chapel, along with other scale models of famous planes.

For the above, I edited the photo in Photoshop where I removed the post, ground, and buildings and then processed the photo in Luminar AI, where I proceeded to replace the sky with a more dramatic version. As a final step, I edited the above in Nik Collection Color Efex Pro 4.

For this next version, I took the above photo and sent it to Topaz Studio 1.0. There, I called up the Topaz Simplify 4 plugin to give it a different look, and then used the Digital Frame option in Studio to, well, frame the photo. Back in Lightroom, I tweaked the contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, and ended up with this:

But, as usual, I sent yet another copy of the original to Studio and played with the Impression plugin to get a version of their pastel options . . . and then back to Studio for the frame, and back to Lightroom for finishing touches and exporting.

The last thing I was going to do was try a monochrome conversion using Nik Collection Silver Efex 2 . . .

I said “was going to do” because as I was working on the monochrome version, I wanted to try Topaz’s Restyle plugin to get a more dramatic version . . .

Obviously, each photo version is a matter of taste, especially since they are significantly altered from the original.

Here’s a gallery of the above

This LINK will take you to the SmugMug gallery that has the full-size versions of the above and also photos in recent reminder posts.

For them who might want to look at something else, here’s a LINK of me playing around with stuff . . . . oh, what the heck . . . here’s one more LINK.

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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