I am now back in circulation after a 5 day trip to Paris for some fairly intense photography. Each image involves 3 RAW files and 3 jpeg files. Thus for 1204 images taken I ended up with 7224 image files and 76.6 GB on a spare Terabyte Hard Drive which is filling fast. Needless to say my uploads are going to be about Paris for a little while.

Starting at the beginning this image was taken at London St Pancras Station as the Eurostar was boarding. This was my first trip on the Eurostar which runs at up to 186 mph. This is looking from the back of the train up the redeveloped St Pancras Station. This area is only accessible to passengers after going through check in and passport checks. My carriage was towards the far end. I took some quick shots here and headed up to board just as some nearby station officials started moving towards me almost certainly to tell me to stop taking pictures.

 The picture was taken handheld 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. To see the settings used see this image on my flickr stream and click the Camera name top right for Exif details http://www.flickr.com/photos/edwinjones/6959270652/ 

Photoshop

Detail brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant, Dramatic settings with adjustments. Slight Vignette added.

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance.

Brightness layer increased 24 points.

Vibrance layer increase 41 points.

Saturation adjustment layer greens used to decrease the greens in some small areas.

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 55 amount and 55 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from the corners and parts of the highlights on the nearby train.

Some tidy up with clone brush.

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. It will be noted that a lot of the improvement  comes with the Photoshop editing.

Original at 0EV

EurostarBefore 0EV