Originally Posted by
Ben H
In the interests of getting something done, I'm going to call it a day on this one. That means many of the pic edits I just ended up doing quickly - if it was more important, I'd do them better, but hey, this is for fun, so... ;)
This small version looks bad and quite noisy, I had a bit of a colour profile battle on output, but you'll get the idea.
Other than general fixes (cloning back the water (although even though I fixed the foreground obstruction, I liked cropping the water a little to shift the attention to the dome), and removing one of the cranes (poorly - I was going to do the other one too, but the wires are too much of a pain). Then some general contrast and colour improvements with multiple adjustment layers targetting different areas.
I dodged and burned, and did selective sharpening - ie I duplicated the image, did an unsharp mask to sharpen it, masked it out completely, then used a layer mask to paint in the sharpening selectively on the construction building, the dome, the boat in front (but not the small boats behind) to help separate those, and I only sharpened the foreground yellow towers, and not the rear ones, to improve the sense of depth - quite effective on the full size, although it's difficult to see in this one.