I have been going out to LA to shoot for a few weeks now and I have always wanted to get this shot but yes I have avoided it because everyone else has gotten this shot or some type of shot like this. Today was my day to capture this and then I decided to process it a little different to try to make mine stand out amongst the rest. Yeah right!
Did a lot of driving around in circles with a lot of the streets closed off because of movie shooting and the Emmy's being down there. So when in doubt...get the money shot!
This was fun to take and with the processing you really can't tell if this is sunrise or sunset, any guesses?
This is an HDR with the processing done in Photomatix and then my usual processing in CS5 and finally mono conversion with tinting in Silver Efex Pro 2.0.
The Shot:
>Standard 3 Shot HDR +1, 0, -1, ISO 400, F/13, 24-105L @28mm, Tripod and cable shutter release.
Post Processing:
>ACR
>Removed All Sharpening, Removed Black, Added Noise Reduction, Removed Chromatic Abberration
>Saved as Tiffs
Photomatix:
>Detail Enhancer
>Strength 100%
>Color Saturation 72%
>Smoothing (Slider @8.0)
>Luminosity 0.00
>White Point 1.124
>Black Point 1.055
>Microsmoothing 2.0
>Microcontrast 4.9
>Saved as 16 Bit Tiff
Post Processing CS-5
>Topaz Adjust-Color and Detail Enhancement
>Topaz InFocus-Global Sharpening
>Topaz Denoise-Sky only
>Color efex Pro 3.0
>Pro Contrast (Lowered Opacity 61%)
>Tonal Contrast (Everything but sky Lowered Opacity to 61%)
>Copy and pasted in -1 exposure-Masked and Gradient tool used to bring down brightness in freeway
>Decided to go black and white
>Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.0
>Preset High Structure Smooth
>Color Filter Green
>Blue Toner 9
>Cloning to remove dust and spots
>High pass sharpening
>Cropped, Framed and Sized for posting
Great shot! Way cool to share your post-process steps for the picture. The shot is just amazing.
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