Skyline Last Night

[August 15 Photography]

Any thoughts or ideas on this one?

[EOSBoy]

Good capture, the only thing I can point out is the silouetted buildings on the bottom right.

[Mark1]

I love it The tower really stands out but the other buildings are still recogniseable. Im not too keen on the silouetted buildings either. But they are not distracting to me.

[TheSonofDarwin]

The bottom of the image is distracting. I think a tighter crop, getting rid of the bottom and part of the right might make the image more appealing? It removes the distraction and puts the tower off center just a bit. Then just brightened up parts of the image and minor contrast additions.

[swjim]

I really like Justin's crop.

[August 15 Photography]

I like your adjustments as well, Thanks for the input.

[August 15 Photography]

Just curious, what method did you use to lighten up the image.

[tdodd]

Real quick and dirty but I just cloned in bits from elsewhere to fill in the black areas. More care would yield better results. The question is whether you want authenticity or simply a nice scenic image

[Flo]

I like the original photo with the new crop.Frame it!

[TheSonofDarwin]

Originally Posted by August 15 Photography

Just curious, what method did you use to lighten up the image.

I used an action called Darken/Lighten Center - it's part of Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 (full trial available) - essentially lets you lighten/darken the center and lighten/darken the outsides of an image via a gradient all in one go. However, all you'd have to do is lighten the image and apply a black/white gradient mask (Black to White to Black). Then using the same plugin I applied low opacity Tonal Contrast which essentially added the extra light boost, but by bringing out the existing lighting within the original (just a curves adjustment in % form). But that's all I changed.