London Underground Bullet Train Final

Full details about today’s image are below. First a tip about aspect ratios and cropping.

Tip of the Day

Coping with aspect ratios and cropping. The aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and the height. For a DSLR this is usually 3:2 and for a Compact usually 4:3. When you want to crop a picture using the existing aspect ratio just click Front Image on the crop toolbar. Most times the existing measurements will be there by default. However you may want to crop to a different ratio. An example is if you intend to produce a 10 by 8 print. This has an aspect ratio of 5:4. Click clear in the Crop Menu bar and enter 10 in for the width and 8 in for the height assuming a horizontal picture.  Note the default measurement is cm so this has to be changed. If this is not for printing just enter the new aspect ratio. Do not enter a figure for resolution to avoid resizing. In these circumstances you have to loose some of the image so move the crop area to suite. When done go to image and image size. The pixel size will now be correct for the crop but resolution will be too high. Make a note of the correct pixel size. Change the resolution to the original figure or 300 for printing. Pixel resolution will now have changed so change that back to the figure obtained after the crop.

The Shot

This is a shot from my last day trip to London in June. The shot is taken on the Angle Station of a branch of the Northern Line. Thanks to one of my contacts Aaron Yeoman for the location from several photos he took here. It is a quite photogenic spot thanks to the especially wide platform

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. I used ISO 200 to gain a fairly low shutter speed of 1/6^th second to get the movement in the train in the original. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 2 additional images were created at +2EV and -2Ev for a “false HDR” with each image having Noiseware Pro applied.  A Photoshop action I had saved was used to create the extra images automatically. The images were 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 copy in as a new layer the 0EV image. I used a black layer mask to exclude this and then a white brush to bring in the layer on the roof only. This brought down a strong highlight from the lights. A selection of the roof was used to confine the brush to that area only.

Next a zoom blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. The effect centre tool in Topaz was used to make the zoom blur emanate from the end of the tunnel A layer mask was used to partly remove blur from some of the people.

Then Topaz Adjust Vibrant preset group crisp preset was used to bring in more detail

General adjustments in curves to enhance contrast. Some areas excluded with a layer mask.

Hue Saturation Reds only saturation was increased to bring up the reds on the train some of which appeared too pink

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 30 amount and 30 radius. A mask was used to partly exclude the effect from highlights.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original image. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result after zoom blur and adjustments.

Original at 0EV

London Underground Bullet Train Original

Tonemapped image Detail Enhancer

London Underground Bullet Train Tonemapped

Final Image

London Underground Bullet Train Final

Edwin Jones