What kind of LR or PS filters are used in these photos?

Question

I came across a very nice architectural images and tried to figure out the development process. No luck so far to reach this nice level. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I don't think there is anything particularly special going on. It doesn't take multiple captures and HDR to explain the pictures you show. You do need decent sensor dynamic range, but not excessively so for a good modern camera.

These picture seem to be taken a bit before dusk. That and the overcast sky accounts for the flat lighting. Since the artificial lights are visible but not overwhelming, the photographer waited until just the right time before dusk when the ambient sunlight was at the right ratio to the artificial lights to show them but not feature them.

The "trick" here was to wait for the right time just before dusk, or possible just after dawn. The window may be only 5 minutes near the equator, more at polar latitudes. The rest doesn't require any exotic explanations and could easily be done with a decent modern camera in a single shot.

Answer 2

As told in the comments, I think it is an HDR image.

HDR uses a set of photo's with different exposure, and blends all the well exposed parts in the image to one image. Therefore, all parts of your image are detailed.

On wikihow you can find a nice tutorial on HDR images.

This result is being created:

With 3 seemingly boring pictures:

It is hard to get such an effect with only one image. However, I can imagine it is possible if you use a raw file en brighten the shadows and darken the highlights and then stretch the dynamic range.

Answer 3

The photograph seem to have a good dynamic range, it seem like shot in the golden hour (minutes?) with nice exposure settings as Olin Lathrop wrote. For a shooting timetable you can search about "Goldern Hour Calculator", these would give you schedules which would be relevant to your position on earth. If you own a smartphone, there are many handy free apps (Exsate Golden Hour app on Android systems is great). try the blue hour as well...

(experimental part of the answer) Or if you try to achieve this with your photographs already shot, you can search for a HDR-look filters or you can achieve this by experimenting with Lr sliders (if you have high contrast photographs, this won't be nice)

on lightroom you can try combining these variations, and if you are lucky you can come bit closer with a single photograph (in develop module of Lr)

• increasing white slider (a bit)
• cliping the highlights with highlight slider
• you can brighten up the shadows with shadows slider
• you can pop up clarity slider and maybe decreasing little bit contrast
• and lastly in the example, you can change the white balance, it seem colder

do not forget to de-noise your work, since pushing up shadows can create some unwanted noise. Of course all these settings are relative and outcome maybe not what do you expect.