Cathedral of Monreale – Monreale, Italy (HDR Vertorama)

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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.

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

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