Tower Bridge

rosterland · February 12, 2019, 2:59am

Another B&W creation.

Tower 2.jpeg

Laundromat · February 12, 2019, 8:35am

Great image. Maybe some Clarity to make the bridge ‘pop’

rosterland · February 12, 2019, 10:26am

Thanks I’ll try that.

Artisan-West · February 12, 2019, 5:51pm

This could benefit from some tone mapping to improve contrast, sharpening and smoothing of the sky. If you are interested I can upload an example using this photo.

rosterland · February 12, 2019, 6:49pm

Thanks yes that would be great.

Artisan-West · February 12, 2019, 7:05pm

I did some tone mapping to improve contrast then sharpened (using AI Clear) and finally used the smudge tool in Affinity Photo (or photo editor) to smooth the the sky which had banding. I also used a clone tool to remove the vertical contrail which had a scratch look. There was a slight tilt in the photo that was removed using the crop tool and rotating the picture CCW.

If the original was in color you could use the B&W adjustment in Topaz studio instead of tone mapping.

rosterland · February 13, 2019, 1:05am

Thanks I can certainly see the difference. I have a closer color photo of this I messed with I can add in here that I really liked for some reason. This was more where I wanted to take this photo so I will have to go back to the original and play around some more.

rosterland · February 13, 2019, 1:07am

This is the other tower bridge one I played with

Artisan-West · February 13, 2019, 6:10pm

rosterland, are you using a calibrated monitor? If not, then you may not be adjusting pictures correctly especially if your brightness and contrast are too high. Read more here: Welcome to Calibrite
and here: Monitor Calibration for Photography

This last image looks desaturated and a bit low contrast like the top B&W image. I use the Spyder 4 calibrator by Datacolor which is good (latest version is the Spyder X). There are a number of monitor test pictures online, this is one. http://drpp-ny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Fujical.jpg The grayscale should go evenly from white to black and skin tones should look normal.

rosterland · February 13, 2019, 10:52pm

Oh no I am a complete amateur I am just doing this on my MacBook Pro.

Artisan-West · February 13, 2019, 11:24pm

In the picture below you should see all the levels from black to white. If one end is bunch up then you can set your brightness and contrast to see all of the range. Adjust brightness first so you see the steps in the black area. Then adjust Contrast to see the steps at the white end. You can read more here. "Brightness" and "Contrast" controls

If you see all the steps then you are probably ok though not totally calibrated. It’s hard to get photos correct if you are not seeing the right color and tones on your monitor because it will not look right on other monitors. You may have a display calibration setup on your Mac (I don’t know about them).

rosterland · February 17, 2019, 9:54pm

Thanks I’ll take a look