Title • Four Points Sheraton

This is a shot from the roof bar of the Four Points Sheraton hotel in Dubai, taken a couple of days after this year's Gulf Photo Plus training event. It's also the image I've posted as this week's Mini-PSD as the processing was quite interesting, i.e. I used 15 separate Curves adjustments. The first of these provided a (mostly) global adjustment to the contrast, the 15th toned the image, while the other 13 altered specific areas of the image, particularly the various buildings. The reason for this, as you can see if you take a look at the original, is that there was quite a lot of atmospheric haze (in the form of low clouds), so the buildings all look soft. By selectively amending the contrast, particularly for the buildings or the left, I was able to make the scene as a whole look a lot clearer. This sounds like a complicated process, but it was just a case of working with each building in turn, then generating a mask to block the effect from the rest of the image.

On a related note, quite a few of you have requested yesterday's image as a Mini-PSD, but I'm going to use if for a Creative Workflow tutorial instead. I'll be working on this over the next couple of days so hope to publish it by Thursday at the latest.

Anyway, tutorial stuff aside, I am pleased with this one but would like to hear from you too.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

6.52pm on14/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/13.0 15s shutter priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation