Chris Froome Race to St Malo Final

I have just returned from a week in France taking in some of the Tour de France stages in Brittany. This was  Stage 10 last Tuesday finishing in St Malo. The location was at Cancale about 15 miles from the finish.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 28-200 zoom at 60mm. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 2 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, Painterly 5 preset with adjustments

Photoshop

Some distracting elements on the right were cloned out

Extra detail was brought in using Topaz adjust, Vibrant preset group, vibrant preset. A layer mask was used to apply this effect only to the 3 main cyclists.

A pan blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. A layer mask was used to remove the blur from Chris Froome in the yellow jersey and the 2 nearest competing cyclists to make them stand out. This involved a lot of fine detail level brush work on the layer mask. To get accurate for the complex area behind bike and rider I used a number of selection areas using the pen tool to confine the brush to particular areas when bringing in the blur.

The next step was to select just the wheels and add a radial spin blur in Photoshop to give an accurate movement look to the wheels.

Vibrance adjustment layer increased 12 points.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and standard sharpening with Unsharp mask.

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.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original image. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result after pan blur and adjustments.

Original at 0EV

Chris Froome Race to St Malo Original

Tonemapped image

Chris Froome Race to St Malo Tonemapped

Final Image

Chris Froome Race to St Malo Final

For Licence see Chris Froome Race to St Malo

Edwin Jones