Ascent to the Light Southgate Underground Final

Another shot taken on the northern part of the Piccadilly Line, London. This one is of Southgate Station. Like many others on this part of the line this station was built in the 1930s and has a lot of Art Deco design.

For a change I went for mono in this image which I felt worked best. I got lucky with the figure ideally placed at the top of the stairs and the processing aimed to emphasise that. With all the enhancement processing I used masks to remove any of that from the people coming down the escalator on the right so they remained in the shadows and did not detract from the central figure.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. I took 3 pictures for HDR but in the end used just 0EV image with a little RAW, Topaz and Photoshop editing to enhance.

Photoshop

Opened the RAW image in Camera Raw. Used the sliders for recovery for the highlights plus Vibrance and Clarity.

Topaz adjust was used with vibrant presets group with clarity preset to bring in more detail. The effect was applied on a layer with a layer mask which I used to exclude the people on the down escalator from the enhancement.

Brightness increased a little excluding the people on the right.

Saturation reds and yellows increased for the mono tones.

Conversion layer for mono

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 60 amount and 60 radius. A layer mask was used to exclude this effect from the people on the right, and also to avoid bright areas on the adverts.

The crop tool was used for better symmetry. The clone tool was used for tidy up.

BEFORE AND AFTER

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

Original at 0EV

Ascent to the Light Southgate Underground Original

Final Image

Ascent to the Light Southgate Underground Final

For licences see Ascent to the Light Southgate Underground

Edwin Jones