The Blue Room – Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR)

The Blue Room - Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR)

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Before and after

Making-of

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The story of this photo:
In the last two weeks, I was a bit slow in following your streams and commenting. As a matter of fact, I did not have a lot of time to do any photo editing and uploading. I am trying to be more active now. I hope you are all doing great, and that you had a nice and relaxing Easter break. Did you get to do some shooting? I hope so! Well I actually did. I was visiting some places with my family. One was the Abbey and Palace at Bebenhausen. I got quite a few nice shots there, and this is the first upload.

Bebenhausen Palace was originally built in the 12th century as a Cistercian monastery. Later, in the 16th century it was partially re-built and used as a hunting palace by the kings of Württemberg. Even until the mid 20th century it was still used as a parliament building by the government. Unlike many palaces of that time, its style is not very pompous but more oriented towards the upper-class living standards at that time with mainly wooden interiors.

Enjoy!

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

How it was shot:
> Handheld [details]
> Three exposures (0, -2, +2 EV) autobracketed and merged to get and HDR
> Camera: Nikon D7000
> Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
> Details can be found here

How it was tonemapped:
> Preparation: developed the raw files with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA [details]
> Created two additional exposures in ACR (+4EV and -4EV) to preserve highlights and shadows [details]
> Resulting TIF images were then used as input to Photomatix
> Tone-mapping: Photomatix Pro 4.0 (Detail Enhancer)

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 on the entire image (more aggressively in the shadow areas) [details]
> Topaz Infocus on the entire image for sharpening
> Saturation layer on the blue ceiling and walls (master)
> Saturation layer on the wooden parts (reds, yellows)
> Global saturation layer (master)
> Global levels layer (more contrast, brightness)
> Vignette effect using a masked fill layer [details]
> Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]
> Watermarking

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

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HDR Cookbook – Before and After: The Blue Room – Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR) The Green Room – Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR) HDR Cookbook – Before and After: The Green Room – Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR) HDR Cookbook – The Making of “The Green Room – Bebenhausen Palace, Germany (HDR)”