LightningPaul

A few months ago I promised many more shots of Rotterdam. I slightly forgot about that, sorry, but today I would like to make it up. This is made in the center where you see many great examples of modern architecture. Personally I really like to see and to photograph them.


TECH INFO: one RAW file to capture a much as possible data. First I corrected in DxO Optics Pro the perspective by making the horizontal lines of the building parallel, because during capturing I didn't used a tripod. Afterwards I developed in DxO multiple exposures.
Initially I turned them into a HDR image to tone map them but I could not get something decent. So I used the exposure blending option in Photomatrix. This step made the lighting a bit more balanced but was actually not so worthwhile.

Afterwards I did extra processing in Photoshop. I used twice the curve tool for the bottom part of the building and upper part of the image. I just use the gradient tool and draw a little vertical line across the border of the two parts of the image. It nicely divides the image with a nice transition so that any tweaked part does not have an abrupt border. Here in this image a simple horizontal separation was not enough, I used the eraser brush to add the building at the right to the mask of the lower part (and  excluded it from the mask of the upper part too).
The lower part got a contrast decrease. The upper part a contrast increase, but by mainly focusing on the darker parts. Also I made the sky a bit darker by modifying the blues and the cyans using the select color tool. Finally I used another masked curve adjustment layer for the top part of the sky, where I increase the contrast even more. Again, I just draw a little vertical line on the mask with the gradient tool.

Sounds like lots of work in Photoshop but in fact typing this tech-info takes me more time :-)

UPDATE: there are requests to compare this image with the original one. I made it temporary available here.