Dusk on "La Défense" —Paris
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 · Flickr (Creative Commons) · 2016
A picture of "La Défense" taken at sunset from Saint Germain. La Défense is the business district of Paris, where there are the high-rise skyscrapers of Paris. I took this picture on the balcony of a friend's place, pilling up a stool on a table for lack of tripod :). A long exposure and low ISO gave a very low noise image. Unfortunately, it was a day with a lot of pollution and the contrast on the skyscrapers was low, though the colors were splendid. The shapes (clouds?) in the sky are fully artificial, created during post-processing. For post-processing, I first reconstructed the images from raw using Darktable. I used a very light non-local-means denoising as well as a light anisotropic filtering. To increase contrast, I tuned the curves and used a local contrast enhancement filter. The, in "the Gimp", I dimmed the foreground and added motion in the sky. To work the sky, I generated artificial fog with a deep purple color. Then I applied radial blur to the corresponding layer, leaving the center part with much less blur. I added a layer mask and modulated it to add more transparency in the center of the image (I used one touch of a very big brush with an anisotropy that I had set to match that of the image). I added touches on the corners of the image by creating a new layer with the same transparency as the layer of the clouds, filling it with black and "drilling" a big hole of transparency in the center with an anisotropic brush used on the layer mask. Finally, I wanted to create a bit of irregularity in the radial blur of the clouds, to avoid having straight lines, so I used the IWarp filter on the clouds, to bend the lines in various places.