Built in 1912 and restored in 1993, the Bank Street Bridge is the most attractive piece of civil engineering in Ottawa, Ontario. Beautiful lighting makes it especially eye-catching at night.
Odd-looking color casts are always an issue when shooting in artificial light. Your camera's white-balance settings may help but probably won't solve all the color problems in situations like this so corrections with image-editing software are necessary. To get rid of the yellowish-bluish cast in the BEFORE image I desaturated and darkened the yellows, reds, blues, cyans and magentas.
But while I wanted to reduce these colors in some parts of the image, I was careful to retain them in other areas. I didn't want to lose the yellow lines on the road, the red streak of tail-light, the yellow sign above the arch on the right, the yellows/reds in the foliage and the subtle color variations in the cobblestones. A photoshop layer mask allowed me to precisely target the areas where color would be altered.
The BEFORE image is well exposed but the light looks flat. I used fine-contrast and tone-curve adjustments to add sharpness and detail. I especially wanted to bring out the detail of the cobblestones.
An ultra-wide angle lens (14mm) created perspective distortion - notice in the BEFORE image how the edges of the bridge seem to be twisting away from the center. I corrected this.
I cropped the image to make the bridge more prominent and remove dead space in the upper right. I used the clone tool in photoshop to eliminate the distracting orange and black pylons in the upper right.
And oh yes, I could find no way to set up the shot without including my tripod's shadow. I got rid of it with the clone tool.
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