Metropolis at Lloyds FinalMetropolis at Lloyds

This is a shot of the Lloyds Building in the City of London taken on a London day trip last Monday 2^nd March.  On the left is the Willis Building. It was a very windy day though mainly sunny. While walking to this location I got a good buffeting as the wind was channelled between the skyscrapers. Setting up a tripod would have been pointless so I used a handy flat topped post to put the Camera on pointing up. I used a wireless shutter release. I used a 10 stop BW Neutral Density filter resulting in 57 seconds and plenty of cloud movement with the wind strength.

The picture was taken with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle lens at 10mm.

The image was opened in Camera Raw and edits made there to reduce exposure and increase clarity and vibrance.

Photoshop

To start various adjustments were made to the original colour image with various Topaz Plugins.

First Topaz DeNoise using the RAW moderate preset.

Next Topaz Clarity was used to enhance edges with a layer mask used on the photoshop duplicate layer to exclude the sky from the effect.

Next Topaz Detail was used with Micro Contrast Enhancement II as a preset and some adjustments.

The Mono Conversion was done with Topaz BW Effects. Some adjustments first in the Basic Exposure and adaptive Exposure panels. Then the most important part was local adjustments. This is the really useful bit. By using the Edge Aware Slider and pushing it to maximum I was able to edit the sky and buildings using the dodge and burn tools to darken the sky and lighten parts of the buildings. The edge aware brush confines the brush to within edges such as the area of the sky without needing to make a selection.

Further adjustments were made in Photoshop using selections and levels and curves

BEFORE AND AFTER

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

Original

Metropolis at Lloyds OriginalMetropolis at Lloyds Original

Final Image

Metropolis at Lloyds OriginalMetropolis at Lloyds Original

Edwin Jones