I had a completely different image originally picked out for this month. It was also an HDR, but of a gold course fairway. When I showed both of these to m wife, she couldn't decide. What eventually made up my decision was the fact that the golf course shot was on flickr for 3 weeks, with only 136 views and 4 comments (no favorites). That didn't seem like much of a contender.
So this photo looking up State Street towards the Wisconsin Capitol building won out. I really like the balance between the sun and the Overture Center for the Arts. Also like the colors and reflections in the glass.
Post Processing:
* Chromatic Aberration
* Combine three exposures in Nik HDR Efex Pro
* Clone out some dust and vignette
* White balance
* Increase black point
* Increase shadow brightness
* Lens Correction - unskew and stretch
* Topaz DeNoise
* Increase saturation and vibrancy
* S curve
* Color adjustments to reduce blues/purples in the buildings, and make the sky blue (had an ugly yellow tint and purple areas)
* Blur the sky to reduce noise further
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
Statistics
Place: 226 out of 275 Avg (all users): 5.2397 Avg (commenters): 6.0000 Avg (participants): 5.1935 Avg (non-participants): 5.3929 Views since voting: 498 Views during voting: 183 Votes: 121 Comments: 1 Favorites: 0
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.