This is another shot from my 10 day trip taking in some of the Tour de France stages in northern France. This was Stage 6 from Abbeyville to Le Havre. This one was taken on a corner at the small village of Martin Eglise just before Dieppe and about half way into the Stage. The rider in yellow, the race leader at the time is Tony Martin who crashed at the end of the stage and broke his collarbone. As a result Chris Froome took back the Yellow Jersey at the end of the following days race. The rider just behind and to the left of Tony Martin in the picture is Mark Cavendish.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Tamron 28-200mm zoom at 150mm. Edits were carried out in RAW to improve clarity and Vibrance. Further adjustments were made using Topaz Adjust plus adjustment layers for Vibrance and Saturation.

Next he image was adjusted in Topaz lens effects to add a zoom blur. The zoom centre was fixed on the Tony Martin’s face. The effect was applied on a duplicate layer and a layer mask. A brush was then used to exclude more of the cyclist. The big advantage of a layer mask is the ability to precisely control how much of the effect to apply to each part of the picture by using a brush on the mask with different opacity. For example the leads cyclists were originally not visible through the zoom effect. A brush at about 40% opacity was used to remove enough of the zoom to allow their shapes to appear without distracting too much from the main cyclists.

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