New York, New York: Before & after
It's easy to forget sometimes how much work goes into making an image look the best it possibly can. While this is usually shown with a beauty portrait, I thought I would present it a little differently by using one of my better known cityscape images of Manhattan.
The image below is a raw file, straight out of camera with zero adjustments other than resizing and saving as a jpeg to use in this post:
Before
While it is a nice image, there are a couple things to correct, such as the horizon and verticality of the buildings, not to mention adjustments to contrast and so on.
After
While I decided to go with a conversion to black and white for the final image, you can clearly see that adjustments were made along the way to the lighting and dynamic range of the scene. Dodge and burn was used to enhance areas of the photo as well as boost the sky. The horizon line was fixed along with slight verticality adjustments. Outside of the dodge and burn, all main edits were done using ACR, including the b&w conversion, which was then brought into NIK Silver Efx Pro 2 for some fine-tuning. Final touches included a run through Dfine 2 for noise reduction in some troublesome areas, and back in to PS for a High-Pass overlay to sharpen.
Fine art prints of 'New York, New York' are available here.
For those interested, here is the original images EXIF info:
Camera: Canon EOS 5D MK III
Lens: Canon 24-70mm 2.8L @30mm
Aperture: F 4.5
Shutter speed: 1/200s
ISO: 320