Blue Guide Rails Descent to the Underworld Final

This was taken in one of the London Underground tunnels coming from the concourse of the adjoining Kings Cross and St Pancras mainline stations in North London.

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

Detail was brought back in with Topaz adjust with vibrant presets group with Boost preset with adjustments. Some areas were excluded from the effect by applying Topaz on a duplicate layer with a layer mask.

General adjustments in levels to enhance with a layer mask used to exclude highlights.

Vibrance was increased by 11 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 highlights.

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

Blue Guide Rails Descent to the Underworld original

Tonemapped image

Blue Guide Rails Descent to the Underworld tonemapped

Final Image

Blue Guide Rails Descent to the Underworld Final

Edwin Jones