La Defense Blue Hour Cityscape Final

This shot was taken at La Defense the modern Paris Business District. This was taken in the blue hour during my 2 night stay in Paris for the finish of the Tour de France. The location is from the Voie de l'Horlogerie, looking down Avenue Jean Moulin. The curved building is the EDF Building. The great thing about the La Defense District is that it was purpose build with a central pedestrianised Esplanade with all building entrances being at that level, the roads and cars go underneath. Either side of the Esplanade there are pedestrian overpasses. These provide great photographic viewpoints of the futuristic architecture. The tunnel in the distance in this picture is where the road goes under the Esplanade.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 3 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. The image was processed first to Detail Enhancer and then Fusion. Click the Camera name top right on Flickr for this image for Exif details and the settings used.

Photoshop

The Detail Enhancer image was used as a base and the fusion image copied in as a layer. This was applied with a mask only to the road and sides to bring down an over yellow look from the street lighting.

Verticals were straightened using filter – Lens Correction – Custom.

Detail was brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant preset group, Clarity Preset.

General adjustments to increase brightness excluding highlights with a mask..

Hue Saturation  used to increase yellows in the lights in the buildings only using a mask.

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 43 amount and 43 radius.

Clone tool used to tidy up the sky.

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 Blue Hour Cityscape Original

After Photomatix Detail Enhancer Tonemapped Method

La Defense Blue Hour Cityscape Tonemapped

Final Image

La Defense Blue Hour Cityscape Final

Edwin Jones