EDIT THE SHOT
1
LIGHTROOM LENS CORRECTIONS Open your RAW file in Lightroom and select Lens Corrections. To minimise the impact of using a wide-angle lens, check the ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’ and ‘Enable Profile Corrections’ tick boxes.
2
TOOL TRANSFORM FUNCTION Use the Transform in Lightroom to straighten horizons and any remaining wide-angle distortion. Use the Guided feature and place your guidelines on the distorted buildings. Use the content aware fill to sort out the adjustment areas or simply crop.
3
CHECK THE HIGHLIGHTS AND LOWLIGHTS With high-contrast shots it’s easy to clip the highlights and shadows, but using the ‘Basic’ sliders and some selective radial filters on specific areas of the buildings you can correct this easily.
4
BLACK & WHITE CONVERSION Turn blue hour into black and white using the profile browser in the ‘Basic’ tools of Lightroom. I will often use Silver Efex Pro if I can’t find a preferred Lightroom profile as this offers a more dynamic choice.
5
SPOT REMOVAL I know it’s incredibly dull, but lengthy long exposures can show spots or missing pixels on the image so in Photoshop I always zoom into at least 100% and scan the image for spots. Or, use the Camera Raw Filter tool to scan and remove.
6
CROP OR NOT TO CROP I love a square crop in all aspects of my photography and to get a real sense of fine art in this shot I felt a square crop on the buildings with a hint of sky movement remaining works really well.
“I always zoom in and scan for spots”