Descent to Warmth Tate Britain FinalDescent to Warmth Tate Britain

I took another day trip to London on Monday 9 December. This was an opportunity to visit an all new Spiral Staircase, red letter day! This is at the Tate Britain Museum in Pimlico. After 2 years of renovations the oldest part of the Museum re-opened on 19^th November complete with a new Spiral Staircase to the lower levels.

The stairs lend themselves to B&W photography and I was originally going to do that with this image until I saw the possibilities of the contrast with the warm tones on the lower level.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens at 10 mm. 3 raw images 2EV spacing. The ISO setting was 800 to give a fast enough stutter speed in the light.

 The images were opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

Photomatix

The 3 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix with a custom preset.

Photoshop

The 0EV image was opened. This image was then copied in as a new layer. A black layer mask was used to exclude this. Then a white brush at low opacity was used to build up detail in highlight areas on the stairs.

Topaz Adjust Vibrant colour boost preset was used to bring in more detail and colour especially in the lower area with a layer mask used to exclude some areas towards the top.

Adjustments with adjustment layers to increase contrast overall and then saturation yellows to bring down the over yellow look of the ground floor.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

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 39 amount and 39 radius. A layer mask was used to exclude this effect from some highlights.

The clone tool was used to remove distracting area on the plinth top right and to even out some areas.

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

Descent to Warmth Tate Britain OriginalDescent to Warmth Tate Britain

Tonemapped image

Descent to Warmth Tate Britain TonemappedDescent to Warmth Tate Britain

Final Image

Descent to Warmth Tate Britain FinalDescent to Warmth Tate Britain

For licences and prints see Descent to Warmth Tate Britain

Edwin Jones