Lines towards St Pauls Final

This shot was taken on my latest day trip to London. This one was at One New Change near St Pauls.

One New Change is a major office and retail development in the City of London and was completed in October 2010. The centre is located at Cheapside, one of the areas within the City historically associated with retailing and markets, and is very close to St Paul's Cathedral and its entrance lines up perfectly. The picture was taken with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle lens at 20mm.

The image was taken into the light with the sun behind the Cathedral making it an ideal candidate for HDR. 3 raw images were taken at 2EV spacing. Opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs.  The images taken were not sufficient to cover the full range of light so I added extra exposures at either end using Camera Raw.

Photomatix

Camera Raw was used to add extra images either end. There were then 5 images at 2EV separation which were outputted in Photomatix with fusion natural settings

Photoshop

The Plus 2EV image was brought in as a new layer and applied with a layer mask to only St Paul’s to bring more light in.

The minus 2EV image was brought in as a new layer and applied with a layer mask to only parts of the clouds to control highlights.

The image was adjusted in Topaz vibrant Autumn Preset with adjustments to suit to bring in more detail and warm up the image. A layer mask was used to part exclude the adjustment from some areas such as highlights.

General adjustments in levels to enhance and brighten with a layer mask to exclude the highlight areas

Hue Saturation yellows  adjustment layer to warm up the image.

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 30 amount and 30 radius. A layer mask was used to exclude this effect from some highlights.

The crop tool was used for better composition and symmetry.

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

Lines towards St Pauls Original

Tonemapped image

Lines towards St Pauls Tonemapped

Final Image

Lines towards St Pauls Final

For licences and prints see Lines towards St Pauls

Edwin Jones