Tunnel Walk to Infinity Final

The tip of the day is about using a selection for accurate clone brushing. See end of this post.

This is another image from a day trip to London in March. I took this shot at the Green Park, Underground Station London. The normal shot has a wall with blue polka dots. This looks pretty good but I wanted a bit more impact for the shot so went for a zoom blur. This can be done in Photoshop, see the Tutorials but I went for Topaz Lens Effects which has more control.

No HDR for this one. A single exposure was processed first in Photoshop  to enhance and then the Zoom Blur applied.

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

Photoshop

General adjustments were made in levels and curves to enhance with layer masks to partly exclude the roof.

Saturation adjustment blues used to increase the blues in the dots on the walls.

Vibrance was increased by 64 points.

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 46 amount and 46 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from the roof area.

For the Zoom used Topaz Lens Effects, Lens Motion Effect and preset Zoom 2. The centre of the zoom was set with Effect Centre Tool which sets this by clicking on the picture where required, in this case the end of the tunnel.

Some tidy up with the clone brush to remove highlights and uneven tones from some parts of the roof..

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original. Then the image after enhancements in Photoshop  and then the final result after the Zoom Effect.

Original image

Tunnel Walk to Infinity Original

After Photoshop

Tunnel Walk to Infinity after PhotoshopTopaz

 Final Image after zoom

Tunnel Walk to Infinity Final

Tip of the Day

There are many occasions when you may need to clone brush an area with a particular tone but do not want the brush to stray into an area with a different tone. An example is the roof in this image where I wanted to tidy up the light brown panels either side of the centre lighting panel. This sort of thing can be very fiddly to get right. A good way to solve this is to confine the clone brush to a selection. Select the area you want and clone within the selection. As you brush the cloning will not go outside the selection. Note however that the sample point can move outside the selection so keep an eye on its location and resample as necessary. See also yesterdays tip about clone brush sampling.

Edwin Jones