London Dolphin Tower Bridge Final

Another shot from my last day trip to London early in November. This is an often photographed scene. I had it to myself for a while but when I was almost finished the area started filling up with Photographers and tripods

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. 3 raw images 2EV spacing for HDR. Opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

Photomatix

Outputted in Photomatix to Detail Enhancer. Click additional info on flickr for this image for Exif details and the settings used. As well as the HDR I wanted something else to give a different look from all the other images. The part mono effect was easy and worked well for this particular image. In Photomatix there are sliders for saturation shadows and saturation highlights. Desaturating the shadows and increasing saturation in the highlights produced the mono look in the foreground.

Photoshop

The image was first straightened using the crop tool and the handles on the corners.

Detail was brought back in with Topaz adjust with vibrant presets group with Crisp preset with adjustments. Some areas were excluded from the effect by applying Topaz on a duplicate layer with a layer mask.

General adjustments in levels to enhance with a layer mask used to exclude highlights.

Contrast increased by 51 points.

Saturation blues were decreased for a more natural sky.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

First duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening

Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 31 amount and 31 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from highlights.

Crane in the distance on the left removed using healing brush content aware and clone brush.

Flagpole on right removed with healing and clone brush to avoid distracting from main interest of picture.

Light on far right toned down to remove distraction.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the middle of the 3 exposures. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

Original at 0EV

London Dolphin Tower Bridge Original

Tonemapped image

London Dolphin Tower Bridge Tonemapped

Final Image

London Dolphin Tower Bridge Final

For Licences see Edwin Jones Photography

Edwin Jones