Sky to Sky La Defense Final

Today’s Tip of the Day is about copying layers to another image. See end of this post.

This shot was taken at La Defense the modern Paris Business District. The Skyscraper is the Tour Manhattan located not far from the Esplanade La Defense Metro. This building was built in 1975 and is 110 m high. The tower was the first in La Defense whose silhouette is curved. In this case the sky blended with the reflection in the building. The image was taken from right next to the building.

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. Click the Camera name top right on Flickr for this image for Exif details and the settings used.

Photoshop

There was a lot of contrast in the image with the sun reflecting in the glass so I brought in the -2EV and 0EV images as layers with layer masks and applied them to highlight areas.

Detail brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant preset group, Crisp preset to improve detail and colour with some highlight areas excluded from the adjustment with a layer mask.

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance.

Vibrance increased 37 points.

Brightness layer with layer mask and brightness increased in sky.

Saturation adjustment layer blues used to decrease overall blues.

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 70 amount and 70 radius. A mask was used to exclude the effect from some highlights.

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

Sky to Sky La Defense Original

After Photomatix Detail Enhancer Tonemapped Method

Sky to Sky La Defense tonemapped

Final Image

Sky to Sky La Defense Final

Tip of the Day

Do you ever have a situation where you have made some complex edits to a picture with adjustment layers and would like to make the exact same changes to another image or perhaps a different version of the same image? This tip is about easily copying a layer from one image to another. This could also be used with blending images. First have both images open. In the source image select the layer to be copied. To copy more than one layer press and hold control and click on the layers to select. Right click a selected layer, from the window click duplicate layer(s) In the next window in the destination box click the dropdown and select the file name where you want the layers to go. Click OK and your layers are copied to your destination picture.