Cronus – The Before & After

(Click on the image for larger view.)

One of the good thing about having a shooting spot near to your living area is that you can revisit the place again and again, aiming for a real epic weather. I have been to this place countless time,  sometimes just to bring my friend here, as it is one of the most iconic shooting spots in Kuala Lumpur. Talking about the day when I took this photo, I was actually on a jog, lol. During my jog, I saw the sky, and I think there’re chances for it turn out to be a great sunset. Quickly I rushing back to my house, grab my camera, jump into car and speeding to here. I am still sweating when I arriving the place! lolllll

Luckily this is what I got in the end, hooray! 😀

Shooting Info:

ISO-100. f8 aperture at 16mm. Capturing 7 different exposures with shutter speed from 1/40 to 2s.

I have also captured several other shoots when near blue hour, which allow me to capture with longer exposure at shutter speed 15s to 30s, creating a nice beautiful light trail.

Following are the bracketing shots that i capture.

(Click on the image for larger view.)

I picking the exposure 1 photo to start as the base photo, blended in the light trail from the photos I captured near blue hour, and also performing slight recovery on the highlight area at the sky.

Just to making thing more interesting, I look into all the photo that I took on that day, and decide to blend in the train from the following photo. As I didn’t change the composition during the whole shooting, I can easily blend in the train with masking and brush tool in photoshop.

Done all the basic blending and recovery, here is the fun part and usually most of my 80% effort spending here. I make a couple of adjustment on the color balance and curve. After that I using Nik Software plugin, Tonal Contrast to giving boost on the specific contrast area. Then I using luminosity masking to do a more precisely adjustment on the exposure & contrast I want. I have also slightly brighten on both the light trail and the twin tower building area, to lead the viewer’s eye into the subject I want them to focus on. During the processing, I notice that the red colors appear to be oversaturated, so I added another hue/saturation adjustment, choose channel Red, and desaturate it. For the final touch, I sharpen and export the photo, done! 🙂

Here is the Before & After Comparison

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#city #jelatek #epic #klcc #lighttrail #sunset #kualalumpur