So we arrived to Florence (I decided to skip the part of traveling through Italy since it’s the same rainy weather all the time) but arriving to the piazzale Michelangelo was a bit difficult to navigate since it was overcrowded… I managed to place my huge tripod in a safe and secured location but saw that the composition and the foreground elements were not as I desired them to be… after many shots take I changed the location and moved on the upper level of the terrace. There were literally thousands of people and I almost gave up since no one was letting me to get in the first row. After the clock was ticking I got what I desired, (even though people were coming in front of the camera anyway) started shooting since the sunsets was fading fast, changing different techniques compositions framing and so on. It was already dusk and the city lights began to touch the surface of the old architecture of this city, I changed the composition once more and this is exactly what you are looking right now. The key element here is that I included some of the most famous landmarks of Florence here, the Ponte Vechio, the Duomo and the Palazzo Vechio
Starting from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom the raw files were modified a little, such as removing chromatic aberration, lens correction, straightening, decreasing highlights and increasing the overall contrast in the image. I recently got Oloneo, and it became a really awesome friend of mine helping me in very difficult situations as this one here. I firstly merged all 5 exposures in Oloneo, than I did put all the layers on top of the HDR (in Photoshop) file and manually blend different parts of the image such as the harsh lights, and harsh shadows, everything else was just as I desired. Did some sharpening and some color correction since the contrast between the cool colors from the sky and the warm colors from the lights was not satisfying to me, it took me a while but at least I achieved the exact thing I planned. Other than that, I did work with multiple layers since I like to keep my workflow clean, so anytime I wish to change something (in the future) I can just go back to the only thing I wanted to change, and not do everything from the beginning. With the help of the Luminosity masking techniques and Color Selection I managed to get as much details from every part of the image and still maintain the contrast as well. With the help of topaz denoise I was able to reduce the noise on the image
