Cathedral of Monreale – Monreale, Italy (HDR Vertorama)

 

The story of this photo:
This is the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily, Italy. This church is a national monument of Italy and one of the most important attractions of Sicily. Its interior contains the largest cycle of Byzantine mosaics extant in Italy. It covers 6,500 m²

It was, of course, impossible to set up a tripod and make this properly (no time, no space, no permission). So I set the ISO to 1600 and shot these 15 shots handheld. Therefore, the quality of the original shots was not very good which did not really help. I hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

Take a look at my “HDR Cookbook”! It contains some more information on my techniques.

Success story:
This photo was featured in the Explore D90 Content from September 1st to September 2nd 2010.

How it was shot:
> Taken handheld (Read more about the technique!)
> 5×3 autobracketed shots (three exposures each with 0, -2, +2 ev)
> Camera: Nikon D90
> Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
> Details can be found here

How it was stitched and tonemapped:
> Created 5 HDRs (32 bit) using Photomatix version 3.1
> Stitched the 5 HDRs using Photoshop and saved in OpenEXR format
> Tonemapped resulting panorama HDR using Photomatix version 3.1 (Detail Enhancer)
> Saved as 16bit TIF
> Take a look here for a more detailed description.

How it was post-processed:
> Post-processing was done in Photoshop
> Topaz Adjust on the entire image to get back the colors and the details [details]
> Topaz Denoise [details]
> Global Levels layer (corrected contrast)
> Saturation layers on the marble, the organ, the seating, and the golden mosaic ceiling to fine-tune the tones
> A bit of retouching to fix little spots that were seriously underexposed
> Sharpening using the smart sharpen filter

Any comments, feedback or criticisms are highly welcome! Thanks for viewing!