Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a photo by Tony DeSantis Photography on Flickr.

This started out as an regular HDR shot but then you start to blend in the all the different exposures here and there.
Fix the sky
Fix the blown out lamps
Replace some halo's from different lights
Darken the road...and pretty soon you have an HDR Hybrid and you end up with more bracketed photo blends than HDR. But that is ok, it gave you a nice base.
But then the real Post Processing starts because you want to get to what you visualize as the final image
Nik Color Efex Pro:
>Pro Contrast
>Bleach Bypass
>Midnight with a mask
>Adjustment Layer-curves for contrast
>Adjustment Layer-Selective colors to adjust color of sky
>Silver Efex Pro-Because for a second I thought to go black and white but then decided to change the blend mode to Soft Light and mask for city only.
You start processing a shot with a certain final image in mind but as you process the image starts to move in a slightly different direction. Sometimes it is straight ahead bam, bam , bam and done and sometimes you have to go around a little to finally get there. I think this was one of those shots that I had to go the long way home.