The Cloister – Monreale Abbey, Italy (HDR)

The story of this photo:
It seem that every serious HDR photographer needs to have a few standard shots in his/her portfolio. Some abandoned car wreck, some shot from under a bridge, some shot of a pier going out into the sea, some sunset shot with rocks and water in the foreground, a cloister shot etc etc etc.

I have made a shocking discovery: I have none of these in my stream!!!

Now is the time to change this! So here is a cloister shot.

This was shot in the abbey of Monreale in Italy. I have tried to recreate the wonderful light that I experienced when I was there. Unfortunately, my time there was quite limited and there were a lot of other people there. So, no chance of shooting this without those tourists. I upgraded to Photomatix Pro 4.0 recently, so this was a chance to test the semi-automatic deghosting feature. It worked reasonably well. Anyway, just ignore the people and enjoy the cloister!

If you are interested, take a look at my “HDR Cookbook”. It contains some more information on my workflow and techniques.

How it was shot:
> Taken handheld [details]
> Three exposures (0, -2, +2 ev) autobracketed and merged to get and HDR
> Camera: Nikon D90
> Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
> Details can be found here

How it was tonemapped:
> Preparation: Developed the RAW files in ACR mainly for CA correction [details]
> HDR creation and tonemapping using Photomatix Pro 4.0 (Detail Enhancer)
> Saved as 16bit TIF

How it was post-processed:
> Post-processing was done in Photoshop
> Transformation correction (straightening, slight partial distortion correction to make the image symmetrical)
> Topaz Adjust on the entire image to get back the colors and the details [details]
> Topaz Denoise on the entire image [details]
> Levels layer on the sky (brightening)
> Levels layer on the floor (more contrast)
> Saturation layer on the floor (slight desaturation)
> Levels layer on the plants (darkening)
> Levels layer on the masonry (more contrast)
> Levels layer on the ceiling (more contrast)
> Saturation layer on the ceiling (master)
> Global saturation layer (master)
> Global levels layer (fine-tuning contrast)
> 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!