Infographics: Photoshopping the images of places

For the images of the places that are behind the text before each one turns red, I have been playing around with editing the images on photoshop. For example:

Original Photo:

1. Black and white line art (Colour dodge inverted duplicated image on top + Gaussian blur + -100 saturation):

2. Solid black and white (-100 saturation + altered levels):

3. Altered colours ( -50 saturation + altered levels):

I think I like the third one the best as I think it fits best with the bright background colours and works well with the animation, compared to a black and white image