The Tower of Brussels
By Brian Auer • September 14th, 2007Here’s a photo from my trip to Belgium this last spring. I took this shot from the Grand Place looking up at the town hall building. It was dark and I didn’t have my tripod, so I cranked the camera up to ISO1600, opened up the aperture, and got on one knee in attempts to stabilize myself. The camera metered at 1/10th of a second, which is ridiculously long for shooting handheld, but the shot turned out OK anyways. I still wish I had my tripod — not sure when I’ll be back out that way.
This photo started off a little different than most of my others. Sometimes I do a quick evaluation with the JPEG images just to see what different things will look like. If I see potential, I pop open the RAW and go from there. I really liked how this one would look as a black & white, so I opened up the RAW to start processing. I found that I couldn’t get the same gritty look and feel from the RAW file as I had with the JPEG. So rather than fight it, I just started editing off of the JPEG.
The original JPEG (1) actually looked pretty decent, but I started things off with a small curves adjustment (2) to bring up the highlights. Then I did the black & white conversion (3) using the CS3 Black & White adjustment layer at 4% red, -36% yellow, -29% green, 105% cyan, 213% blue, and 194% magenta. These settings really darkened the building and brightened the sky. This also introduced a lot of visible noise into the sky because I amplified the blue channel, which is typically very noisy on digital cameras. After this, I made a lot of little changes including a curves adjustment (4), selective burning (5) in the sky, selective dodging (6) in the sky, a color burn layer blend (7) at 100% opacity and 5% fill, and a screen layer blend (8) at 100% opacity and 12% fill. Each step along the way produced small tweaks to the tone and contrast. No sharpening on this one because it made it look weird.
** You can also see this photo on Zooomr and Flickr **
Photo by Brian Auer
03/07/07 Brussels, Belgium
The Tower of Brussels
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
42mm equiv * f/4 * 1/10s * ISO1600
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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I love how it looks like it could be in a comic book. I’m inspired to try and get more gritty-looking photos, that’s for sure. Awesome processing!
Thanks Bryan, let me know when you get some “gritty” photos — I’d like to see them.
No offense, after the processing the tower looks a bit like a haunted house, was that the mood you wanted to generate?
No offense taken! I WAS actually trying to get a dark and gritty look on the image. I’ve done this with several photos of old buildings, and I really like the mood they generate. This one is by far the grittiest because it was shot at ISO1600, but it sets it apart from my other “dark” buildings.