Tron Light Cycle

Today's photo is a bit different than my "normal" work, I decided to take a shot of something that I had around the house and see how it came out. I have a few odds and end collectibles, but I finally decided on the collectible light cycle that came with the Collector's Edition of Tron: Evolution which I purchased at the beginning of December. I still have not yet had a chance to play the game, but I thought the light cycle would make a good subject for a photo. The only downside to this shot was that the light cycle is an instant dust magnet.

The hardest part about this shot (apart from the subject being a dust magnet) was getting the "glow" while retaining everything else from the HDR process. I ended up using several steps to do this, but one of them I never thought about until Scott Frederick mentioned it in his blog post yesterday. He applied different levels of noise reduction to separate layers, then merged them together. That is one of the steps that I did here. Applying a LOT of noise reduction made the image blurry, which is one of the effects I wanted for the "glow". Merging the blurred "glow" with the sharpness of the rest of the image produced a portion of the effect I was looking for. I also did a lot of brightening, over saturation, cloning/spot healing to try to make the coloring of the glow as uniform as possible. For giggles and grins, I also added a bit of "glow" to my watermark at the bottom right, using Drop Shadow and Outer Glow in Photoshop CS5.

Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback, and remember clicking on the image takes you to my online gallery hosted at smugmug so you can view this (and any other of my photos) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!

Tron Light Cycle