Image Background

Location: Sinjuku Ward, Tokyo, Japan

Sinjuku Station in Tokyo, Japan is well known as a central hub for rail lines leading to all parts of Tokyo and beyond the city as well.  This photo was taken from the 38th floor of the JW Marriot Hotel looking across the city at night.  The 10 second exposure required the use of a tripod, but the skyline really came alive against the backdrop of a cloudy night.

This shot was taken in 2006 while on a business trip.  Tokyo has always fascinated me because it seems to exemplify the ability of the Japanese to remain very ‘Japanese’ even during these times of globalization.  In most major international cities, it is rare to have any difficulty making your way around.  Though English is not the native language in most countries, it is rare to not see both native and English signage.  Not so in Tokyo; in Tokyo you live Japanese, without the crutch of English signage.  Don’t get me wrong, the Japanese people are very gracious and helpful; but Tokyo, the city, and Japan the country, are very Japanese — global without being globalized.

In my travels around the world, I have often been dismayed at how ubiquitous the US food multinational has become as country after country has its own unique flavors and foods replaced by McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and the like.  I have always traveled with the mantra to ‘eat local’; I can get a Big Mac anytime…

Image Technical Details

• Camera:  Nikon D70
• Lense:   12-24mm f/4 Nikkor Super Wide Angle
•  ISO: 200
• Exposure: 10 sec @ f/8

About the Image Workflow

At the risk of repeating myself over and over with these blog entries, my workflow is fundamentally Lightroom for initial processing, Adobe Photoshop CS5 (w/plugins) for final processing.  I will spend a little time on the plug-ins I use in Photoshop because there has been some updates.

Lightroom

In Lightroom (now version 3.5) I perform all global image exposure and contrast adjustments as well as the color to B/W conversion.  Exposure was pretty good with this shot as I only adjusted it +.25 to help open up the shadows.  This of course also increased the brightness of the light coming from windows and street lights, but I felt this was a good tradeoff and I would still try to adjust the image highlights down in the later tonal adjustments.

I added a small amount of fill light to open the shadows of the image a bit more.  Until I did this you really couldn’t see the details of the park at all.  By opening up the shadows, I think the overall emotional quality of the image changes a lot as the area becomes a little more ‘inviting’ and less dark overall.  You also begin to see the effect of the low clouds as the light streaming from the top of the three buildings on the right is more noticeable.

Finally, I add some black back to the image to add more depth.  In addition, Lightroom now has a ‘presence’ slider called ‘Clarity’ that I will use on occasion.  I am not 100% clear on how it affects the image, though I believe it is primarily creating edge contrast, which does make quite a bit of difference for some images.

I used the tone curve adjustment to turn down the highlights and lights that began to run too hot with the addition of brightness and fill light.  If you think in terms of the zone system, I keep my highlights limited to zone 10 and the lights begin around zone 6.  For the tone sliders that translates to the highlight slider (far right) is set to the right most 1/4th of the right half of the tone curve.    The area from that slider to the middle of the tone curve is the light adjustment.  For this image, Lights were -15 and highlights were -13.  I believe the result was good balance between darks, shadows and lights while minimizing blown highlights.

The black and white conversion fine adjustments are made with the HSL/Color/B&W adjustment tool.  It is very difficult to explain the rationale for the adjustments I make here except to say I am working to bring contrast to the right places so that the overall image has better presence.  Maybe that is the ‘magic sauce’ that is my special addition to the image.  The original image is on the right, for those of you who are interested in the before and after conversion.

Photoshop

I will be brief about the Photoshop work, as I am once again afraid that I am ‘running on’ a bit.  I am a big fan of Nik Software plug-ins.  I use Sharpener Pro 3.0 for RAW pre-sharpening and final output sharpening.  I am beginning to experiment a bit with Silver Effects Pro 2 for Black and White processing and Dfine 2.0 for noise control.

For the work on overall black and white ‘presence’, and contrast control I have been using PercepTool by George DeWolfe for a couple of years now.  There has been a major upgrade with PercepTool 2.  I am not sure yet whether I am a 100% fan of the UI changes, but I continue to be impressed at the ability to get that extra ‘wow factor’ using the tools George has brought to this space.

A couple of small comments about the final workflow, I am very diligent about following a couple of ‘rules’ when doing image processing in Photoshop.  I have listed them below and hope that you get some value out of them as my ‘tips’ for getting a good result.

• 16 bits for processing, 8 bits for final storage.
• RAW Sharpening is the first step in Photoshop
• Noise reduction and Sharpening are both needed, but are the last step in the process.  For a good result, flatten your image first, then create a new noise layer and sharpening layer from the core background layer image.  The right image result invariably is a ‘mix’ of both, which you do my adjusting the opacity of the two layers until you get good noise reduction and output sharpening without having too much of either.
• I always save the PSD file BEFORE flattening the image and doing the noise and sharpening adjustments.  That ensures you can get back to the detailed work you did in Photoshop at a later date if you like.

That is it, everything else depends on the photograph, but I follow these rules consistently every time.  So far it seems to be working.  Until next time…

 

 

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