It snowed in Newark the first winter we were here. Walking through the market place one night in February 2012,* I took a photo with the Canon S95 compact I carried around:
Looking at the EXIF data, I can see that the exposure time was half a second, so I must have rested the camera on some street furniture.
Fast forward to 2021…
.. and we are in the position of choosing the official Mayor's Christmas Card. Of the ten photos I suggest..
.. the Cavalier / Roundhead statue in its previous location in snowy Beaumond Gardens; this one; Fountain Gardens in the snow; the market square from the Town Hall at night with the Christmas 2020 decorations; the Buttermarket Christmas decorations; looking up at the Christmas 2020 decorations; some flowers in the ballroom of the Town Hall; a sunset over the River Trent; an angel from a local Methodist church's display from 2018; and a view of the Town Hall and market place from the parish church tower..
.. this is the one picked.
OK, step one is to take the 'RAW' camera data file and let DxO PhotoLab 4 do the corrections for the lens and remove noise. This reminds me that the sensor on the S95 is bigger than the JPEGs it produces, so the results have more of the picture above and below the JPEG:
The lights then used around this corner of the market place meant that the snow appears with a definite yellow tint, which is not the best look for snow! Fortunately, Exposure X6 makes dealing with that very easy: greatly reduce the saturation and luminance of the yellow (and to a lesser extent, orange) in the image via two sliders. Hmm, what happens if you boost everything else – red, green, cyan, blue, purple, and magenta? Ooh, I quite like that:
Finally, some other choices were added, and the winner was the one that makes it look like an oil painting via Snap Art:
* I see from looking at what other photos I took that evening that it was after a performance of Opera Della Luna's production of The Merry Widow at the local theatre.
The people who sat behind me may wear black tie to an opera, but they proved unable to stop talking while it's on…
