Oosterdok Amsterdam by AmstelBright, on Flickr

The dramatic dark sky tone was created using the http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-presets-lightroom/ WOW-d_BnW_01 filter for Lightroom, which basically filters out blue tones while highlighting yellow in the black&white mix settings. The photo was also straightened and cropped a bit.

Very nice.  Lots of interesting visual elements.  The cranes poking into the dark sky really make the image.

Doug

Thank you all for the compliments!

Thanks for the compliment. Here's an earlier version that is close to the unprocessed RAW file:

Details

The original photo was underexposed, so I used Lightroom here to correct for that mistake. Even so, the bridge is still poorly lit in this version. I actually thought this photo was pretty much a failure, until I browsed through some Lightroom B&W pre-sets and witnessed the dramatic effect that some of these filters could offer.

I used to be very critical about photo post-processing, thinking it was a form of cheating, but I have changed my mind. After all the dark-room manipulations from the film era were not that different from the kind of post-processing that can be done in Lightroom. It sure saved this picture for me!