I took this shot when in Melbourne. The shorter building kind of reminded me of the buildings in Severance.
Despite the shot being taken when it was pretty night, the clouds reflected a lot of light due to light pollution. Most of the tonal information is concentrated in a fairly narrow middle-dark band. This made it challenging as the scene has night-time buildings but almost a daytime overcast sky, which I worry may be confusing to the viewer as it is unusual lighting.
I’m not super satisfied with my edit, as I can’t get the buildings sensibly bright enough without causing the sky to be too bright. I can only burn the clouds so much with the Tone EQ before loosing contrast and making them look flat and bland.
Here is my edit DT 5.7 but only 5.6 modules used. I used non-AI denoising because I personally only use AI denoising as a last resort. I used AI masking to do separate exposures for the sky and the buildings. AI masking is a great addition to DT that makes my like easier.
Anyway, I’m having a hard time getting tone equaliser masks or parametric masks to cooperate nicely with the sky/buildings. I feel like the halo around the right building is encouraged by the shape of the clouds around there. I got an okay result with ‘guided filter’ instead of the default EIGF. Then I tried Filmic on that one and got some dramatic blooms before masking CB-RGB.
The buildings probably look really unnatural where I’ve made the sky darker than them. Adjust tone equaliser mask opacity to change the sky brightness. (drawn mask in that one).
I won’t say I had a vision with this one but I knew a few things will look great imo.
This is 500t with 2393 print in spektrafilm and then some masking to make the top foggy around the top of the builds and add some contrast to that at the base of the builds. (I crashed spektrafilm somehow because I had a lot of things going in the backgroud and silly windows couldn’t handle it especially resolve) DSC_2671.jpg.xmp (13.9 KB)
I played around with print and film chemistry and set the exposure metering to highlight biased. I also set the compensation to about -1 to get those shadows looking muddy?
I tried to recreate it quickly so this should get close enough I suppose. DSC_2671-maybemaybe.txt (6.9 KB)
Finally about the image, I like that one window with the Red light.
