Carcassonne Castle edit.

Happy Sunday... 

Here i wanted to show how i got to this final image of Carcassonne. 

This is made up of 3 different exposure images. 

It is technically a HDR image, but it has not been tone mapped, i used the exposures as different layers and masked them in. 

Here is the base image as it was out of the camera, 

This image was taken for the exposure of the bridge and Castle.

I used a layer mask to only reveal the parts of the image i wanted to be brighter.

Here is the 3rd image taken, for a darker exposure.

I used the 3rd darker exposure to paint into the sky to darken it and add some drama.

Here the image was cleaned up, from the lights in the windows, and other highlights that i found distracting.
There was a blown out building, which is grey in this image,
I used a part from the darkest exposure and masked it in,
as you can see, it doesnt share the same colouring as its surroundings, and so i used various adjustment layers to make it fit in.
 Contrast and Photo filter were used to get the temperature right.

Here i found the tree  - bush thing very distracting and so i clone stamped it out, on the bottom right of the screen.

Now for some punch and texture,
I use Nik softwares colour effects pro. I apply this to all of the image but then mask back in the effect to where i want it.

To give it a little more punchier contrast, i like to use Nik softwares Silver Efects pro,
by making a black and white punchy layer,

This black and white layer now has a blend mode of Luminosity.

 I found that the sky was to cool, for buildings. And so with adding an adjustment layer of Photo filter
I warmed up the scene.

Finally, the more i looked at the image, i found the water to be extremely distracting and anoying,
and so i created a new layer and painted it with black. I lowered the Opacity to regain some of the texture.


Once again if you have any questions or comments id love to hear from you.

Thanks

Lee