Kuala Lumpur Twin Tower Reflection

Sometimes same spot can look very differently by included different elements, normally here is just a normal car park that lack of interest foreground subject, but with the help of leftover puddles after the rain or a few bottle of water, it created a unique view with beautiful and calm reflection.

Help from my friend Steve & Kian Hock for more water 😀

Shooting Info:

16 mm focal length,

5 Bracketing Photos at ISO-200. f11 aperture from 0.6 seconds to 110 seconds shutters speed.

From the 5 exposures that I captured, I pick the 0 exposure to start with and a -2 exposure will be used to recover the highlight. First I will do some minor adjustment in the lightroom, to correct the lens profile and the distortion. Then I move my processing into the photoshop, I put -2 exposure photo on the top of 0 exposure photo, using the luminosity masking to select only the over exposure part and brush back the detail. There is a car and few of my photography buddy was into the frame too, they were taking different angle of the spot and sometimes this is unavoidable, especially places full with tourist, but no worry, using the photoshop stamp tool, I can easily remove all of them included the dusts too, bye bye Hafidz & others. 😛

I have done some correction on the reflection, I feel that it is not straight as the top part, so I selected only the reflection area and corrected it with skew tool.

Done with all the blending and correction, now is time for color and tone adjustments. I start with color balance adjustment adding more red & yellow tone to the overall picture, and added another one more layer for more red & yellow only on the building together with the gradient tools applying on the masking, so it have a smooth transition from red to blue. Using Nik software, I applying pro contrast filter on the photo and also the polarization filter to darken the sky more. Then I pushing up more contrast by using the curve adjustment on several specific part of the photo. I also perform dodging and burning especially on the building and added the vignette around it to make the building more “Pop”. Lastly, I sharpen and adding saturation before I export the photo. Here is the before & after comparison:

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