Otto Berkeley
Spectre
This past weekend was the 25th annual Open House event, when hundreds of buildings across London open their doors to the public. City Hall remains one of the most popular and photogenic locations in London, but my itinerary during my fifth year attending the Open House weekend meant that, for the first time, I wasn't able to be at the location during its final hour of the day. I'm looking forward to sharing images from several new locations, but in the meantime I've re-edited a shot taken two years ago from the top of City Hall. While it's the first time I've revisited a shot to produce a second edit, I thought it would be fun to see whether two years of changes to my workflow would produce a different finish.
My aim with this image -- as with previous takes on the location -- was a clean and futuristic finish that would emphasise the streamlined design by Foster and Partners and the visual impact of 7,300 square-metres of triple-glazed glass. The lone individual who walked into the frame and paused to capture the scene around her with a point-and-shoot was a happy accident, but I still feel that she brings the architecture to life as well as providing a sense of scale. Five bracketed exposures were captured handheld from the tenth level of the building's helical staircase, and once again these were manually aligned and blended in Photoshop using luminosity masks for a clean and balanced finish. The emphasis was on the brighter exposures to raise the midtones and shadows, but I was also able to refine these masks to isolate the individual on the steps as her darker clothing was largely made up of shadow detail against the brighter staircase. This in turn enabled me to edit her with a separate workflow, lifting the shadows and controlling the noise levels and colour balance without affecting the rest of the image.
At the colour-grading stage, I opted for a palette that featured less cyan and aqua tones and one that was instead somewhere between monochrome and a soft light blue. This was achieved using a mixture of Curves, Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation and Selective Colour adjustments, desaturating the majority of the image and then using luminosity masks to selectively tone the shadows, midtones and highlights.
One detail I'd never been happy with in my original edit was the finish along the panels in the lower-right of the frame, which looked a little dark and gritty next to the pristine glass. For this edit, I created a selection of the panels using the Pen Tool and lifted them into Nik's Silver Efex Pro, where I lowered the midtone and shadow structure, increased the brightness and raised the Soft Contrast, which helped to emphasise the tonality across the panels. I then converted the adjusmtent to the Luminosity blend mode in Photoshop to retain its original colour. Inside Colour Efex Pro, I added sparing amounts of the Tonal Contrast and High Key filters to amplify the whites and give the highlights more definition, as well as the Glamour Glow filter set to reduced opacity, which gently softened the image and created an airy glow that I felt would complement the bright and spacious location.
The final result is a different take on an image that remains a personal favourite, and hopefully an update on the initial edit that does justice to the immense size and sculptural grace of the location.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.
Spectre
This past weekend was the 25th annual Open House event, when hundreds of buildings across London open their doors to the public. City Hall remains one of the most popular and photogenic locations in London, but my itinerary during my fifth year attending the Open House weekend meant that, for the first time, I wasn't able to be at the location during its final hour of the day. I'm looking forward to sharing images from several new locations, but in the meantime I've re-edited a shot taken two years ago from the top of City Hall. While it's the first time I've revisited a shot to produce a second edit, I thought it would be fun to see whether two years of changes to my workflow would produce a different finish.
My aim with this image -- as with previous takes on the location -- was a clean and futuristic finish that would emphasise the streamlined design by Foster and Partners and the visual impact of 7,300 square-metres of triple-glazed glass. The lone individual who walked into the frame and paused to capture the scene around her with a point-and-shoot was a happy accident, but I still feel that she brings the architecture to life as well as providing a sense of scale. Five bracketed exposures were captured handheld from the tenth level of the building's helical staircase, and once again these were manually aligned and blended in Photoshop using luminosity masks for a clean and balanced finish. The emphasis was on the brighter exposures to raise the midtones and shadows, but I was also able to refine these masks to isolate the individual on the steps as her darker clothing was largely made up of shadow detail against the brighter staircase. This in turn enabled me to edit her with a separate workflow, lifting the shadows and controlling the noise levels and colour balance without affecting the rest of the image.
At the colour-grading stage, I opted for a palette that featured less cyan and aqua tones and one that was instead somewhere between monochrome and a soft light blue. This was achieved using a mixture of Curves, Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation and Selective Colour adjustments, desaturating the majority of the image and then using luminosity masks to selectively tone the shadows, midtones and highlights.
One detail I'd never been happy with in my original edit was the finish along the panels in the lower-right of the frame, which looked a little dark and gritty next to the pristine glass. For this edit, I created a selection of the panels using the Pen Tool and lifted them into Nik's Silver Efex Pro, where I lowered the midtone and shadow structure, increased the brightness and raised the Soft Contrast, which helped to emphasise the tonality across the panels. I then converted the adjusmtent to the Luminosity blend mode in Photoshop to retain its original colour. Inside Colour Efex Pro, I added sparing amounts of the Tonal Contrast and High Key filters to amplify the whites and give the highlights more definition, as well as the Glamour Glow filter set to reduced opacity, which gently softened the image and created an airy glow that I felt would complement the bright and spacious location.
The final result is a different take on an image that remains a personal favourite, and hopefully an update on the initial edit that does justice to the immense size and sculptural grace of the location.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.