Climbing to the Future La Defense Final

This was taken on my Paris visit in July. The shot was taken at La Defense the modern Paris Business District. This image was taken in the blue hour. I found steps leading down to an underground car park which formed a good lead in for the futuristic buildings above.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 20mm. 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.

Photoshop

The minus 0EV layer was copied in as a new layer. Opacity was used to show both images and the move tool used for alignment. The new layer was then excluded with a layer mask and a brush used to bring it in 100% for the sky only to tone down highlight areas. I used a selection to make it easier to confine the brush to just the sky.

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

Saturation yellows slight increase for the lights.

Saturation blues used to tone down excessive blues on the buildings.

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 37 amount and 37 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from highlights.

Tidy up with the clone brush. Also used to remove a distracting highlight in part of the sky.

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

Climbing to the Future La Defense Original

Tonemapped image

Climbing to the Future La Defense Tonemapped

Final Image

Climbing to the Future La Defense Final

For licensing see Climbing to The Future La Defense

Edwin Jones