Downtown Dubai By Night

[GBO25]

Taken from substantially the same place as the daylight shot and still from the open upper deck of a tour bus.
Hand held 35mm, f2, ISO 400, 1/13s

[madcrow]

Great image and hand held on moving bus, brilliant.

[Tony M]

Hi Graham.

You did well to capture a reasonably sharp image at 1/13s hand-held.

The night sky has some colour blotches. Do they appear on your monitor before exporting to jpeg (assuming you processed it from the RAW file)? Perhaps you can reduce them by darkening the blacks.

Tony

[GBO25]

Thanks Maurice & Tony.
Yes I know those blotches are there Tony and I have substantially reduced the blacks. It actually doesn't show up very much any more on my monitor but it is more distinct on my iPad. I'll have to tweak it some more.

I've always been very impressed at the effectiveness of the image stabilisation on my 35mm prime.

[bje07]

Hi Graham.

You did well to capture a reasonably sharp image at 1/13s hand-held.

The night sky has some colour blotches. Do they appear on your monitor before exporting to jpeg (assuming you processed it from the RAW file)? Perhaps you can reduce them by darkening the blacks.

Tony

+1 ;maybe verify the verticals

[Manfred M]

There is a touch of perspective distortion for sure. One approach you could use on the blacks is to clamp them even more (in Photoshop I would use a curves adjustment). It's a bit brute force, but with all that light pollution in the downtown area of a big city this is always a bit of an issue.

If you are not seeing this issue on the computer screen, you are likely editing in a place that is too bright. Have a look with the lights way down and see what happens.

[GBO25]

Thanks Jean & Manfred.
I don't have Photoshop Manfred and have no desire to rent their app but I'll take a look at what I can do with the software I have which does have a curves tool.

[NorthernFocus]

Nicely composed image. The noisy sky degrades the image badly. The edited version is much better IMO.

[GBO25]

The extra much adjustment with the curves tool seems to have removed a lot of colour Manfred.

This is my attempt at re editing. I used a fairly extreme gaussian blur on just the sky to remove as much of the blotchiness as I could the using layers in Macphun's Luminosity app I used the curves tool to darken the blacks but again only in the sky. Then I did a mild distortion to get the buildings more vertical.

[Manfred M]

The extra much adjustment with the curves tool seems to have removed a lot of colour Manfred.

This is my attempt at re editing. I used a fairly extreme gaussian blur on just the sky to remove as much of the blotchiness as I could the using layers in Macphun's Luminosity app I used the curves tool to darken the blacks but again only in the sky. Then I did a mild distortion to get the buildings more vertical.

If I were feeling extremely ambitious, I would do a selection of just the sky and make the adjustments locally, but I did not want to spend all that much time at it. That would protect the colours in the buildings a lot more.

[bnnrcn]

Hi Graham, I like the edited version, very good shot considering that it was hand held on a bus