La Defense Blade Runner Cityscape Final

This is a great futuristic viewpoint at La Defence, the Paris Business district. To find this take the Metro to Esplanade de la Defence. Exit the Metro on the right side of the Esplanade looking away from Paris or cross to that side. There is a short flight of stairs walking up the Esplanade from the Metro. Take the pathway on the right. This is only a very short distance from the Metro Exit, about 20 metres. Basically follow this pathway straight on, go straight across the square and straight on along another path to the bridge and the viewpoint. There is another bridge before this one. About 5 minutes walk.

All round here is great in daylight for reflections in the buildings but it really comes to life in the evening and night with lights and traffic trails and varying colours. The futuristic bridge in the picture is just another footbridge leading to a building.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. I took a single image and later creating 3 exposures from the RAW file for a false HDR.

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 -2 image was brought in as a new layer and a layer mask and brush at varying opacities applied to reduce highlight areas.

Detail was brought back in and colour was boosted with Topaz adjust with Vibrant preset group, boost preset.

General adjustments in levels to enhance.

Brightness Adjustment layer was used with a layer mask to darken only the window on the far right to remove distraction from the main part of the image.

Saturation adjustment layer blues used to tone down the blues in the reflections.

A second Saturation adjustment layer reds used to increase the reds in the traffic trails.

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 52 amount and 52 radius. A mask was used to exclude the effect from some highlights

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original, then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

Original at 0EV

La Defense Blade Runner Cityscape Original

Tonemapped image detail enhancer

La Defense Blade Runner Cityscape Tonemapped

Final Image

La Defense Blade Runner Cityscape Final

Edwin Jones