Sky High Towers Canary Wharf London UK

The Shot

 

I took this while exploring London on the Open House Weekend.

The picture looks towards the Canary Wharf Underground Station entrance by Jubilee Park.

 

I usually go for a fairly natural HDR effect but deliberately enhanced it for this one for a more futuristic look.

 

The picture was taken with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. Taken handheld. 3 raw images 2EV spacing. Opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs.

 

 

Photomatix

 

Outputted in Photomatix to detail enhancer. Click the Camera name top right for Exif details and the settings used. The semi manual setting for reducing ghosting artifacts from the people movement between shots was used so any movement missed by the program could be selected.

 

With a lot of people I still missed some so ran the OEV image through Photomatix for tonemapping as a single image with the same settings and then added that as a layer in Photoshop with a black mask and brought in the relevant parts with a brush. Thanks to a Neil Armstrong2 for the last tip www.flickr.com/photos/neilarmstrong2/6204104290/

 

Photoshop

 

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance with layer masks to exclude the highlight areas.

 

Vibrance layer increase 38 points

 

Saturation layer blues to reduce the intensity of the blue in the sky,

 

The minus 2 EV image was copied in as a new layer, excluded with a black layer mask and a white brush at low opacity used to tone down bright highlights

 

Noiseware Pro

 

Unsharp Mask a little sharpening.

 

Duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening to the buildings with low amount and high radius.

 

Resources

 

For Licensing and more pictures see Edwin Jones Photography

 

Done