La Defense Paris Art and Architecture

August 05, 2012 • Leave a Comment

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 just past the Arch De La Defense. To find this walk along the Esplanade de La Defense away from Paris and past and to the left of the arch. This building is a few hundred meters past the Arch on the far left. Well worth looking for if you are in the area. The skyscraper is the KPMG Building and the Sculpture is called the Tête Monumentale

The picture was taken with a Tripod 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 HDR preset group, Dynamic Pop 2 Preset.

General adjustments in levels to enhance and increase contrast.

Vibrance increased 17 points.

Hue Saturation blues used to reduce blue saturation for a more natural look.

Second Hue Saturation adjustment layer yellows used to bring up the few lights in the building with a brush used to exclude the Head from the effect.

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 58 amount and 58 radius.

Clone tool used to tidy up the sky and remove a small shadow area on the left.

Crop used for best symmetry.

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