Gendarmenmarkt – Berlin, Germany (HDR)

The story of this photo

View the Before-and-After Comparison to see where this photo comes from!

I am currently re-discovering a number of shots from a Berlin trip in 2010. Therefore, this upload is from Berlin again. It was shot at the Gendarmenmarkt, a famous and popular square in Berlin. This place was one of the few that was not destroyed during World War II. In the foreground, you see the statue of Friedrich Schiller, a great German poet, philosopher and historian (he is the guy standing). In the background, you see the French Cathedral.

How it was shot:

• 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 tone-mapped

• Preparation: developed the RAW files with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA [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 on the sky) [details]
• Topaz Infocus on the entire image for sharpening
• Levels layer on the sky to even out uneven luminance resulting from the tonemapping (used inverted blue channel luminance as the mask) [details]
• Levels layer on the sky (brightening)
• Saturation layer on the buildings to the left (master, yellows)
• Global levels layer for selective contrast (masked to preserve details in the highlights)
• Global saturation layer (master)
• Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]
• Watermarking

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