Glowing city

Good morning everyone, happy Monday.  I hope that you all enjoyed your weekend, which seemed to go by all too quickly.

I am going to try to do something a little bit different today.  At the end of every post, I go through the processing that I used to get the image to where it ended up.  What I don’t do that I’m going to start doing more regularly is show the before HDR, the “during” HDR and the final product, which is normally all that I share.  I’ll do this for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, being the huge proponent of HDR that I am (in case you didn’t catch that from the “HDR Exposed” title), I want to illustrate how HDR can make most scenes really pop.  Second, to help anyone out there new to HDR to give them a more visual idea of how I get from start to finish.  Finally, I just think that it’s kind of cool to see a before and after series on other folk’s blog, so why not do it own on my own.

So today’s series of shots is again from the Brooklyn Bridge, and this impressive piece of architecture could provide me days of shooting.  This is the view facing the South Street Seaport, a view that I took the last time I was in town, just during the day, so I knew that I wanted to go back at night.  I really like this view, but the only thing that I wish I would have caught earlier was that I didn’t get a crisp exposure of the boat, so I had to mask in one with motion blur.  I think that the plane flying through the sky kind of makes up for it though.  I didn’t even notice that actually until I was processing the shots last night.

Now for the processing.  Above you can see two other versions of this shot.  The first is the middle of the seven exposures that I used, the 0 EV shot.  Below that is the tonemapped, straight out of Photomatix, no edits done HDR.  Pretty crappy, right?  Warm tones, kind of flat.  Photoshop really is a miracle worker.  First off I had to crop the shot, as the alignment from the HDR left a little border.  Next I applied a Pro Contrast mask in Color Efex to remove the color cast and add some pop.  I also did some selective coloring to help make the blue and red lights stand out a bit more.  Next I added a Magic Sharp in onOne PhotoTools that included a sharpener, a turbo boost and a color correction, as well as a vignette effect, which I removed.  Finally, added some high pass sharpening in Photoshop and some slight noise reduction to the sky and called it a day.

Thanks for stopping by today everyone, we’ll see you tomorrow for a Candid Tuesday post on HDR Exposed.