Wat Phratat Doi Suthep – Chiang Mai, Thailand (HDR)

The story of this photo:
I am revisiting the shots I took in Thailand earlier this year. Unfortunately, many of the exterior shots suffer from a very misty and dull sky. So I processed this interior shot of Wat Phratat Doi Suthep. What bothers me about his shot though, is that it is not perfectly symmetrical. I did not pay enough attention when shooting – an illness from which I suffer quite often. But it is getting better slowly. LOL

This scene had a very high contrast, and I only had a monopod with me. So no chance to do more than 3 exposures. Also, I had to step up the ISO quite heavily. Thus, there was quite some noise in the final tonemapped image. I decided to turn this bug into a feature and cleaned up the noise quite aggressively with different tools. Afterwards I merged the outcome with a charcoal-like version of the image to get more of a painting-like look.

I hope it works for you!

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

How it was shot:
> Taken with a monopod
> 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 with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA [details]
> Photomatix version 3.1 (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 [details]
> Topaz Clean to clean regions of excessive noise
> Topaz Simplify on a copy of the original image layer to create a charcoal drawing look
> Blended the charcoal drawing layer with the original image to enhance that painting-like look
> Selective masking of the charcoal layer where it did not produce a good look
> Saturaton layer on the golden elements (yellows)
> Levels layer on the ivory (increased brightness)
> Global saturation and levels layer to tune the colors, contrast and brightness
> Vignette effect using a masked fill layer [details]
> Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]

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