Louvre Night Diamond Paris Final

The tip of the day is about lining up layers with the move tool. See end of this post.

This is another image from the first evening of my stay in Paris in April and I headed to the Louvre to take images of the spectacular courtyard and Pyramid. This area is open and accessible at any time even when the Museum is closed. The courtyard opens onto the Place du Carrousel. Although Tripods are not allowed in the Louvre Museum there is no mention in the regulations of the Courtyard. However I did read on the Web of a photographer being told by an over zealous Security Guard not to use a Tripod. I had no problems and saw no security guards probably because the image was taken at 10.30 pm.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. 3 raw images 2EV spacing for HDR. I used my own Photoshop action to create 4 extra exposures from the RAW files so as to end with 7 images at 1EV separation including 1EV extra at either end of the original exposure range. Each image was noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

Photomatix

Outputted in Photomatix to Exposure Fusion.

Photoshop

Detail was brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant presets group, bold preset settings with adjustments. Highlights in the centre of the Pyramid were excluded with a brush on the layer mask.

Topaz DeNoise was used to bring down noise especially in the sky.

The Plus 3EV image was brought in as a new layer and applied to the walkways only to bring down highlights.

General adjustments were made in curves to enhance.

Saturation adjustment layer reds and yellows used to decrease the reds in the sky and the yellows on the building.

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 62 amount and 62 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from the sky and highlights on the Pyramid.

Brightness adjustment layer with a layer mask used to brighten the roof.

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.

 Original at 0EV

Louvre Night Diamond Paris Original

 Tonemapped image Exposure Fusion

Louvre Night Diamond Paris Exposure Fusion

 Final Image

Louvre Night Diamond Paris Final

Tip of the Day

There will be many occasions when you cannot take a sequence of images for HDR with a Tripod and have to shoot handheld. In this situation the pictures will not be perfectly lined up. Photomatix does a good job with these pictures of lining them up by matching features in the image and then cropping. Bear in mind then that the tonemapped image will not then line up with the any given one of the original images. This is important if you bring one of those images back in with a layer mask to make adjustments to parts of the final image. The original image will be pasted back in as a new layer. To check zoom in on some detail and reduce opacity of the layer of one of the original images brought back in by say 50% or until you can see any mismatch. Use the move tool on the layer to line everything up.  

Edwin Jones