London Underworld by Foot Final

As you may have guessed by now I am quite keen on tunnels so when I visited Greenwich I needed to collect this one. This is the Greenwich foot tunnel under the Thames in London to the North Bank and Docklands. It is 1200ft long and 50ft deep

The red electric junction box is the only bit of colour in the tunnel. I thought the fisheye lens worked quite well for this image.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Samyang fisheye lens at 8mm and f5.6. I took 3 pictures for HDR.

Photomatix

The 3 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix Detail Enhancer creative 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.

The Plus 2EV 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 was used to bring up the red in the box.

Note that Photomatix automatically aligns and crops the 3 images to correct movement when handholding. When bringing in the other images I changed the opacity of the layer so both images were visible. The move tool was then used to align.

Topaz adjust was used with vibrant presets group with crisp preset to bring in more detail. The effect was applied on a layer with a layer mask which I used to exclude some of the highlight areas.

Brightness reduced a little.

Vibrance increased 8 points.

Hue Saturation used to increase red saturation a little on the box only using a layer mask.

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 35 amount and 35 radius. A layer mask was used to exclude this effect from some highlights.

The clone tool was used for tidy up.

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

London Underworld by Foot Original

Tonemapped image

London Underworld by Foot Tonemapped

Final Image

London Underworld by Foot Final

For licence see London Underworld by Foot

Edwin Jones