Natural History Museum – London, United Kingdom (HDR)

The story of this photo

Watch the Making-of video to see where this photo comes from

I have been in London a few days ago. Surprisingly, I had a little spare time. So I went to the National History Museum with my little Nikon P6000. Of course this camera is by far not as capable and versatile as the D90. For some reason, I could not switch it to autobracketing mode. So I had to set the exposure manually. Despite all of these difficulties, I managed to get three decent shots of the main hall. I am quite surprised about the result – not up to the D90 standard, but still acceptably good.

How it was shot

• Taken using a balustrade as support
• Three raw exposures (0, -2, +2 ev)
• Camera: Nikon P6000
• Lens: Built in
• 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)
• Semi-automatic deghosting on the people
• Saved as 16bit TIF

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 [details]
• Saturation layer on the black elements (slight desaturation)
• Levels layer on the black elements (darkening)
• Saturation layer on Charles Darwin (slight desaturation)
• Levels layer on Charles Darwin (slight contrast correction and darkening)
• Saturation layer on the windows at the far end (master)
• Saturation layer on the people (slight desaturation to make the skin tones more natural)
• Levels layer on the frames at the far end (darkening)
• Vignette effect using a masked fill layer [details]
• Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]
• Watermarking

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