The starting image of the Clown Band in the Toronto Santa Claus Parade is badly under exposed. But it has promise as did the music emanating from the snow covered clownsters. So Tone correction is first with Colors | Adjust | Curves.

Our attempt here is to bring up the midtone colors and let the rich darker tones fall close to the original. It can be science using the View | Toolbars | Histogram Window will show how much RGB and Hue, saturation and luminosity you have to work with. Then the Colors | Hitogram Functions | Histogram Adjustments allow users to control precisely fixes to overall luminosity, greyscale, and each of the red, green, and blue channels individually.

But in this case art is easier - and simple Tone Curve preview with trial and error gets us close - and because the overall color correction will be done at the end

The next phase of the basic edit cycle is cropping the photo since our brightened image reveals a sharp, in-focus iscene with a problem of overhang.

Overhang is the portions of an image that steals attention away from the central figures and focus of interest. In our image that is practically the whole background. However, the upper portion of the background has gaudy, clown-like colors. So the plan is to incorporate those in with a a plugin in effect/filter but to crop out the less interesting bottom and lower right portions of the image. Also the flicks of falling snow can work either way so it is

Now comes the fun. Jasc markets an Adobe plugin from Japan called Virtual Painter (i costs $50). This plugin allows transforming a photo into a painting in various styles including slik screen, impasto oils, color pencils and watercolors.

Our choice is collage because it really brings out bright colors in an image. But first we must mask off the clowns - and do so using the Lasso Mask tool. The next step is to choose Effects | Plugin Filters | Virtual Painter | Collage and the dialog show to the left pops up. Clicking on the preview button shows that Virtual Painter will only change the masked off background portions of our image.

As you can see Collage does add a comic relief so to speak to the whole picture. Soo now tall that remains is to make fine adjustments to the color and luminosity of the image. This time we used the Colors | Histogram Functions | Histogram Adjust because we could precisely control the luminosity. In fact we even masked off the middle clown's face to brighten him up...talk about a litllle pancake powder in the midst of a snow job... but that's another story.