Starship Enterprise Paris Final Image

Still in a futuristic space travel mode. This is the canopy over the entrance area to the EDF building in the Paris business district  of La Defence. It looks just like the undersides of the Saucer Section of the Enterprise. This was taken on a fairly miserable drizzly evening. I set up Camera and Tripod under the shelter of the Canopy.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 15mm. 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

The first step was to correct some false blue in the sky which the tonemapping brought in. The original was grey. I copied in as a new layer the -2 EV image and used a layer mask to apply it only to the sky.

Detail brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant presets Crisp with adjustments.

General adjustments in levels to enhance with layer mask to exclude the sky.

Saturation adjustment layer blues decreased and applied with a layer mask only to the Canopy.

Brightness increased on the canopy with a layer mask to exclude the rest of the image.

Vibrance increase 27 points

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer and Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening

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 Topaz and Photoshop editing.

Original at 0EV

Starship Enterprise Paris Original Image

Tonemapped image Detail Enhancer

Starship Enterprise Paris Tonemapped

Final Image

Starship Enterprise Paris Final Image

Tip of the Day

Control colours in an image with the hue saturation adjustment layer. The default control for this adjustment is Master which means changes in the sliders for hue or saturation will affect all colours. Use the dropdown beside Master to choose an individual colour, For example if you want to increase the intensity of yellow colours in an image choose yellows from the dropdown and slide saturation up.

Edwin Jones