Light Trails to Westminster
The Shot
This was taken on my last day trip to London. This one was taken on Westminster Bridge. Not an HDR but a blend of 4 exposures of 4 seconds each. The exposures included 2 London buses coming past. The star effects for the lights were not gained by a filter or processing but just by stopping down to f18
The picture was taken with a tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. I found that for the light trails layers with masks or the various layer blend modes did not work that well. Lighten produced the best result. However for this shot I tried the unusual process of using the startrails.exe program to blend the images which produced a good result. The only downside to this method is that you have to use jpgs as the source images.
Photoshop
The best image for the least pedestrians was added as new layer and a layer mask used to apply it only to the pavement area.
Extra detail brought in with Topaz adjust with HDR preset with adjustments.
A levels adjustment layer was used to reduce brightness at the far end of the traffic trails applying only to that area with the use of a layer mask.
A second levels layer with layer mask was used to increase brightness in the traffic trails on the left and on Big Ben and Parliament.
Vibrance adjustment layer increase 37 points.
Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.
First duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening
Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 40 amount and 40 radius. A mask was used to exclude the effect from the highlights.
Filter, lens correction, custom used to correct verticals and then cropped. This was done only partly as otherwise the necessary cropping would have removed too much of the image.
Some tidy up with content aware healing brush and clone brush.
Resources
For Licensing and more pictures see Edwin Jones Photography
Light Trails to Westminster
The Shot
This was taken on my last day trip to London. This one was taken on Westminster Bridge. Not an HDR but a blend of 4 exposures of 4 seconds each. The exposures included 2 London buses coming past. The star effects for the lights were not gained by a filter or processing but just by stopping down to f18
The picture was taken with a tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. I found that for the light trails layers with masks or the various layer blend modes did not work that well. Lighten produced the best result. However for this shot I tried the unusual process of using the startrails.exe program to blend the images which produced a good result. The only downside to this method is that you have to use jpgs as the source images.
Photoshop
The best image for the least pedestrians was added as new layer and a layer mask used to apply it only to the pavement area.
Extra detail brought in with Topaz adjust with HDR preset with adjustments.
A levels adjustment layer was used to reduce brightness at the far end of the traffic trails applying only to that area with the use of a layer mask.
A second levels layer with layer mask was used to increase brightness in the traffic trails on the left and on Big Ben and Parliament.
Vibrance adjustment layer increase 37 points.
Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.
First duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening
Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 40 amount and 40 radius. A mask was used to exclude the effect from the highlights.
Filter, lens correction, custom used to correct verticals and then cropped. This was done only partly as otherwise the necessary cropping would have removed too much of the image.
Some tidy up with content aware healing brush and clone brush.
Resources
For Licensing and more pictures see Edwin Jones Photography