DRP - Portrait of a Steel Factory
'DRP'
Portrait of a steel factory in Abu Dhabi. It wasn't easy to find an interesting composition with some purpose and order amidst this industrial chaos. I find it incredibly rewarding to spot a pattern when there seems to be non and capture it with camera.
Tech talk: I used Nikon 14-24 ultra-wide zoom on Canon 5Dmk2 and composed my frame by keeping the foreground elements as close as possible to the lens while using the arrangement of pipes to frame the DRP tower in the center.
I started by bracketing 9-stop exposure which was later processed into an HDR tone-mapped image with Oloneo PhotoEngine Pro. Late afternoon sun created very harsh contrasting scene, hence the 9-stop HDR. It was imperative to preserve all highlight and shadow details before proceeding onto BW conversion.
This is where the real work began; I removed the existing background with Perfect Mask Pro 5.2. This is probably one of the most complex masks I ever had to extract from an image. Getting a clean alpha channel between the tiny grates on the upper edge of the image was particularly cumbersome. It took me more than 3 hours to extract a mask which was clean enough for my purpose.
I created the motion blurred cloud by painting blobs of white colour and motion-blurring/radial blurring them in Photoshop. Once I was happy with the fake long exposure sky, I placed it below the transparent foreground image. Composite was clean and I was satisfied.
Last phase was the B/W conversion. I used Silver Efex Pro and placed the Red filter over the sky which turned all blues into solid blacks. Some of the pipes in the upper and side edges of the image were quite dark and they failed to contrast well enough with the black sky. I decided to create individual layers of clouds which I moved in strategic places in order to expose the pipes where bright background was needed in order to obtain a proper separation.
Careful tweaking of the sky took approximately 1 hour until I was happy with overall detailing and luminance.
Final grade was done with Topaz ReStyle. I opted for soft/sharp look where highlights give off a bit of exposure blooming while maintaining all details with surgical sharpness.
Additional image sharpening was performed with Nik Software Sharpener Pro which intelligently adds details where it's needed while keeping the noise at minimum level in areas with low detail.
#blackandwhite #hdr #hdrphotography #steelfactory #fineart #longexposure #photoshop #photographytutorial #postprocessing #retouching #photography #industrialphotography #lightroom #oloneophotoengine #canon #nikon
DRP - Portrait of a Steel Factory
'DRP'
Portrait of a steel factory in Abu Dhabi. It wasn't easy to find an interesting composition with some purpose and order amidst this industrial chaos. I find it incredibly rewarding to spot a pattern when there seems to be non and capture it with camera.
Tech talk: I used Nikon 14-24 ultra-wide zoom on Canon 5Dmk2 and composed my frame by keeping the foreground elements as close as possible to the lens while using the arrangement of pipes to frame the DRP tower in the center.
I started by bracketing 9-stop exposure which was later processed into an HDR tone-mapped image with Oloneo PhotoEngine Pro. Late afternoon sun created very harsh contrasting scene, hence the 9-stop HDR. It was imperative to preserve all highlight and shadow details before proceeding onto BW conversion.
This is where the real work began; I removed the existing background with Perfect Mask Pro 5.2. This is probably one of the most complex masks I ever had to extract from an image. Getting a clean alpha channel between the tiny grates on the upper edge of the image was particularly cumbersome. It took me more than 3 hours to extract a mask which was clean enough for my purpose.
I created the motion blurred cloud by painting blobs of white colour and motion-blurring/radial blurring them in Photoshop. Once I was happy with the fake long exposure sky, I placed it below the transparent foreground image. Composite was clean and I was satisfied.
Last phase was the B/W conversion. I used Silver Efex Pro and placed the Red filter over the sky which turned all blues into solid blacks. Some of the pipes in the upper and side edges of the image were quite dark and they failed to contrast well enough with the black sky. I decided to create individual layers of clouds which I moved in strategic places in order to expose the pipes where bright background was needed in order to obtain a proper separation.
Careful tweaking of the sky took approximately 1 hour until I was happy with overall detailing and luminance.
Final grade was done with Topaz ReStyle. I opted for soft/sharp look where highlights give off a bit of exposure blooming while maintaining all details with surgical sharpness.
Additional image sharpening was performed with Nik Software Sharpener Pro which intelligently adds details where it's needed while keeping the noise at minimum level in areas with low detail.
#blackandwhite #hdr #hdrphotography #steelfactory #fineart #longexposure #photoshop #photographytutorial #postprocessing #retouching #photography #industrialphotography #lightroom #oloneophotoengine #canon #nikon