Chris Froome Tour Winner Time Trial final

This is another shot taken on Stage 11 of the Tour de France 2013. This was on the first individual Time Trial from Avranches to Mont St Michel. The location was at Courtils which was the 2^nd Time Check about 8 miles from the finish.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 28-200 zoom at 28mm. 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 using Fusion tonemapping and Natural preset with adjustments for a fairly natural look.

Photoshop

The Plus 2 EV image was brought in and used with a layer mask to bring more light into the Rider.

In Photoshop Topaz Adjust was used with Clarity preset with some adjustments

Saturation reds and magenta were used to bring down the pink in the banner to avoid distraction. A layer mask was used to apply adjustments only to the banner.

The front wheel was selected and a radial blur used to give the look of movement.

The same treatment was used on the rear wheel.

In Photoshop a pan blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. A layer mask was used to remove the blur from the Chris to make him 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.

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 33 amount and 33 radius.

The image was cropped for better composition and to make Chris fill the frame more.

Tidy up with healing and clone brushes.

BEFORE AND AFTER

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

Original at 0EV

Chris Froome Tour Winner Time Trial Original

Tonemapped image

Chris Froome Tour Winner Time Trial Tonemapped

Final Image

Chris Froome Tour Winner Time Trial final

For Licence see Chris Froome Tour Winner Time Trial

Edwin Jones