Very Nice Steve. The car park could you use an artistic touch of some paint!
 
Paulo, that's a travesty. Hopefully they'll put in a park and not else.

I want to visit Worcester now! Cool history lesson there Steve, and I loved the photos!
 
I recognise the story, it happens where I am from as well, a little dirthole about 20 minutes south of Oslo. The whole town is pretty much being bricked up in a shopping mall and there is less and less reason for the poor souls still living there to go out and do something. People also say that Oslo is pretty. But it's not. Lots of ugly around everywhere and they keep building more and more ugly stuff all over the place.
 
I wish politicians would take a walk from time to time, in the world where every one else is.

Wonderful shots mate.

Very nice work Steve; the colors pop nicely.

 
Thanks all - I'm glad you enjoyed my little tale
 
The photos were all shot in Canon CR2 (RAW) and processed with (the quite incredible) Adobe Lightroom 5. If any of you guys shoot RAW, I think you'll be blown away by just how versatile Lightroom is. I can't compare it with the RAW editing in the full version of Photoshop, but this thing knocks my PS Elements and the Canon DPP software into a cocked hat.
 
Here's another example of the atrocious 60s architecture, this shows the all-concrete Blackfriars Shopping Centre & car park from around 1987:
 

 
 
At least the Council had the common decency to bulldoze it a few years ago and replace it with a car park and bus station that at least someone made a bit of an effort with, they even clad it in tradition bricks and mortar:
 

 
 
 

SteveStrummerUK
 
Here's another example of the atrocious 60s architecture, this shows the all-concrete Blackfriars Shopping Centre & car park from around 1987:
 

 
 

This reminds me of certain parts of Moscow - suffocatingly so. The cars are still pretty similar to these.

There's an entire sub-application in PS6 called Camera Raw.  It should be able to tell even what camera you used and have has a template for basic tweaks required for that exact camera.  You can do a LOT of non-destructive things before you ever need to bring PhotoShop up (and many times you don't even need to) - I now do all my scans in RAW to give me the widest range of values as a starting point.
 
These all tie-up together with another application called Bridge which is like a picture manager on steroids - I love the batch applications you can do with this!  I can setup a macro to add a watermark to shop images in PhotoShop then have Bridge process a few hundred at once and then have it change the filenames so I can tell which images have been watermarked.  Very cool!

craigb
There's an entire sub-application in PS6 called Camera Raw.  It should be able to tell even what camera you used and have has a template for basic tweaks required for that exact camera.  You can do a LOT of non-destructive things before you ever need to bring PhotoShop up (and many times you don't even need to) - I now do all my scans in RAW to give me the widest range of values as a starting point.

Craig, the current version of Photoshop Elements (11) has the latest incarnation of Adobe Camera RAW, I believe the only difference between the Elements version and the CS6 version is it doesn't have quite so many features.
 
Lightroom has everything you'd ever need for working on RAW files as far as I can tell. Until something better comes along of course!

Cool.  Didn't know that.