Tone Map: Photomatix Pro
Notes on Tone Mapping
Photomatix made the overall image a little electric in color, so I adjusted the Saturation Highlights and Color Saturation to be a little below what I normally use. My Strength usually stays at 100, so that did not change here. I wasn’t looking for too much of a surrealistic scene, so my Smoothing slider didn’t drift too much from the right. Because it’s a night scene, I did adjust the Gamma and Luminosity to provide a few darker tones to the image. To get the textures on the face of the building, I opted to use a high Microcontrast setting. If I had found later that the image suffered from a noisy sky, I could have gone back and smoothed it out with Photoshop’s (or Lightroom’s) Luminance Noise Reduction or a blur. Photomatix’s resulting image was also a bit blue, so I increased the Temperature to make the building look nicer.