Hotel du Louvre Final Image

This was the first evening of my Paris trip. After taking night pictures of the Louvre and Pyramid I headed for the Metro nearby in the Rue de Rivoli and came across this great location. I set up the tripod to take pictures of the hotel and traffic trails. The star effects on the lights were gained just with a setting of f22 on the camera. Paris has much less interesting buses than London for light trails as they are generally not double decker and not as colourful. These trails are mainly cars.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 16mm. I took single images later creating 3 exposures from the RAW file for a false HDR.

Photomatix

Outputted in Photomatix to Tone Compressor. For this particular image this produced a far better image than the usual Detail Enhancer settings.

Photoshop

The 0EV image was brought back in as a new layer and a layer mask and brush at varying opacacities applied to use it to darken some parts of the Road and Hotel.

Detail brought back in with Topaz adjust with HDR vibrant pop with adjustments including a slight vignette. .

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance.

Saturation adjustment layer reds used to slightly increase the reds in the traffic trails.

A second Saturation adjustment layer reds used to decrease the reds in the buildings on the far left.

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 49 amount and 49 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from some highlights

Some tidy up with clone brush.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original, then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

Original at 0EV

Hotel du Louvre Original 0EV

Tonemapped image Tone Compressor

Hotel du Louvre V2 ToneCompressed

Final Image

Hotel du Louvre Final Image

 Edwin Jones