Shutter-life|Adaptive photography and more, by Henrik Johansson

During my visits to the Bay Area, I did several photowalks. I shot this building in central San Francisco, probably close to the Montgomery/Sutter intersection. I tilted the camera to create a diagonal through the photo, but some cropping and a little rotation was still needed to align the corners. I had a faily bright and low contrast b/w in mind when I started the post-processing. I increased the exposure by quite a bit and I also fiddled with the brightness of the individual colors. Unfortunately, I felt that the final result was bland. To add some dynamic to the photo, I used the new graduated filter in Lightroom 2. I put the darkest spot in the upper left corner and aligned the filter with the corner of the building, i.e. the diagonal. For the filter, I applied a two step underexposure.  I also added some clarity to bring out the details in the darker part while keeping a lower contrast in the brighter lower right-corner. Finally, I had to tune the overall exposure a bit to get nice balance between the dark and bright parts.