BackdoorArts
Senior Member
Yes, the 16-35 at about 1/2 way (26mm), so I suppose I could have gotten the same look with the 24-85mm. Or could I?! LOL
Processing was a little convoluted. I took the original color photo, already postprocessed in Photoshop and Nik's Viveza 2 and Color Efex Pro 4, and subsequently flattened, and pulled it back into Photoshop after tweaking it a bit in Lightroom. The path my brother sent me on was to do a black and white rendering that would have the same feel as the IR stuff I did and he suggested Split Toning, which I'd never done. So instead I sent it first to HDR Efex Pro 2 to see what kind of feel I could give it with single image tone mapping. I liked what the Deep filter did with it, and I played with saturation and structure a bit until I liked what I saw . After that I sent it to Silver Efex Pro 2 where I believe I started with one of their High Structure presets and tweaked from there. What I've started doing as almost a default with any B&W conversion in Silver Efex is to go to the colored filter section, add a red filter, boost the filter strength to 100% and drag the hue slider back and forth to see how the image changes. Then I may tweak the color sensitivity a bit for some colors to dial in the filter effect. Unfortunately, I wasn't using Smart Layers, so I can't tell you exactly what I did, but I may have added a bit of additional toning. I stopped there, sent an image to my brother for comment and then slept on it. This is what it looked like at the time...
As you can see, the building was almost there, but the sky was heavily vignetted, which I wasn't sure about. The next morning my brother's comments echoed my own feelings and I sent the photo into Nik Viveza 2 to use control points to soften the sky and tweak the overall light. I saved it in PS and stared at it for a while, tweaking some things in LR afterward since some adjustments for me are just easier there. This is what I had at that point.
I thought I was done, but on Monday morning I stared at it, and stared at my couple photo, and stared at some other photos on Flickr, and decided there was just something not quite right with it. In a stroke of dumb luck I decided to go into the B&W Treatment section in Lightroom and, low and behold, it desaturated the image and removed what must have been a slight toning I'd done in Silver Efex Pro and forgotten about. In pure B&W it was almost there. A couple minor tweaks to the Black and White sliders and I was done.
And there you have the rest of the story. LOL
