Creating some Wall Art - A look at my Process for Creating This Image from Start to Finish
I’ve been trying to spruce up my office for a while now, and I wanted to get some wall art printed to hang up behind my computer. As I had been going through some old projects and shoots, I came across an old set of images I had shot of NewYork to turn into a panorama, so I figured that would be a good option. So, below I will detail some of the steps I took when creating the finished image (above).
To start, these photos were taken from the Empire State building back in 2009 and it was late in the afternoon. The light isn’t great, and the lens I used at the time wasn’t great either, so the shots are quite hazy. When I originally processed these photos the first time around, things like dehaze didn’t exist, so I was curious to see what I could do with these now.
The original images before stitching
The first step is obviously to merge the images into a panorama. I have these in Lightroom, so I used Lightroom to create the panorama. I actually shot more than I needed. There are eight images in the sweep that I shot, but merging these produces a panorama that is too wide and off balance so I only used the first six. In Lightroom, I chose the perspective option, and cropped the image to fit.
The Panorama after Stitching - with just some automatic settings applied during the stitching phase
Once merged, the resulting mage was still quite dull, as one might expect. The first port of call was to fix the haziness, and for that, I used the dehaze slider (obviously). I didn’t just apply this globally though, as it is worse in the distance, so I used some gradient selective adjustments to apply it in layers concentrating at the back. The downtown buildings were still a bit dark, so I added a brushed adjustment to even these out too.
For overall settings I also adjusted the white balance and added a tiny bit of contrast and clarity. These were originally shot on a Nikon D90 which was a little noisy, and so I added some de-noise as well.
This improved the image greatly, but I still wasn’t totally happy, so I sent it over to Luminar to do some more work on it. Here I used the Accent AI to add some oomph and it helped a great deal, but I didn’t use too much. I also used a little of the softwares AI structure to bring up the details, but again, I didn’t do too much, because I wanted it to look natural. Finally, I used sky replacement to enhance the sky.
Initial tweaks in Lightroom, fixing the haze, and compensating for the colour and so on. Still a ways to go!
This wasn’t a straight forward sky swap though. I really just wanted to fix some of the luminous and burnt out sky that was at the top of the image, and I blended it into the original sky. I played around with a few different options, and I ended up using one of the built in options. I was reluctant to do this at first, because of the potential overuse of this feature, and because the built in skies are probably going to be used everywhere. But then again, this was only for my own purposes to create some wall art, so it didn’t matter, and one of the included skies worked perfectly. I moved the horizon line up to match the original perspective, and blended it in with the horizon blending options. The relighting function worked a treat too to give the image a nice overall colour and for this I was very happy. Finally I sent it back to Lightroom.
The FinalImage after editing in Luminar (Click to view large)
I haven’t gotten it printed just yet (and I will update this when I do) but I will be using Loxley Colour in the UK (not affiliated or sponsored in any way) to get it printed and possibly mounted, as I’ve used these before and they do a great job, but it will be expensive. They have a few different paper and printing options available and I’m still deciding on which option, but I will share the finished result when I do.
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