farbspiel ha aggiunto una foto al pool:
The story of this photo:
This is a sculpture in the central park (Oberer Schlossgarten) of Stuttgart, Germany. It is quite difficult to get a decent shot of this thing as it is surrounded by all kind of buildings and trees. Moreover, on a sunny day this is a very busy part of Stuttgart. So it took a few attempts until I got this one. I tried to work with what was there and used the trees in the background as a sort of frame that leads the eyes towards the sculpture. At least that’s the idea. Judge for yourself whether that works for you. <
If you look at the real sculpture, it does not have that golden tone. That is my artistic interpretation of it. The tone comes from reflections of the ground that I chose to enhance.
Enjoy!
How it was shot:
> Handheld
> Three exposures (0, -2, +2 ev) autobracketed
> Camera: Nikon D90
> Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
> Details can be found here
How it was tonemapped:
> Preparation: developed the raw files with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA
> Photomatix version 3.1 (Detail Enhancer)
> Tonemapped two versions, one for the sculpture and one for the background blended later in Photoshop
How it was post-processed:
> Post-processing was done in Photoshop
> Topaz Adjust on the entire image to get back the colors and the details
> Topaz Denoise on the sky (more aggressively)
> Topaz Denoise on the rest of the image (less aggressively)
> Saturation layer on the sculpture (increased yellows, decreased blues)
> Curves layer on the sculpture to increase the contrast
> Sharpening on the sculpture using the high-pass filter
> Levels layer on the sky to tune the brightness
> Saturation layer on the sky to tune the blue tones
> Some halo reduction on the sky
> Evening out luminance differences in the sky resulting from tonemapping (using inverted blue channel mask)
> Photo filter layer on the shine to give it a orange tone
> Saturation layer on the ground
> Saturation layer on the trees
> Vignette effect using a masked fill layer
Related photos that you may like:
If you like this photo, you may also want to view the following photos…
> A Subtle Hint (HDR)
> The Crab – Krabi, Thailand (HDR)
…and take a look at the following set(s):
HDR – Stuttgart & Surroundings
Any comments, feedback or criticisms are highly welcome! Thanks for viewing!