St. John’s Co-Cathedral – Valletta, Malta (HDR Vertorama)

The story of this photo

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

This is St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta. I had my monopod with me to avoid very high ISO values. After a few shots, a lady came up to me and said “No tripods, please!”. Being a smartass, I responded “This is not a tripod, madam.” I was pretty sure I had her on this. But she went “Ok, no stands, please!”. Would you believe it? I had to put it away and continue shooting handheld. Considering that the 12 shots for this vertorama were shot handheld with ISO 1600, I am reasonably pleased with the result.

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How it was shot

• Taken handheld [details]
• 4×3 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 4 HDRs (32 bit) using Photomatix version 3.1
• Stitched the 4 HDRs using Photoshop 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)
• Global saturation layer (increased master and reds)
• Saturation layer to enhance the green tones on the canopy
• Vignette effect using a masked fill layer [details]
• Sharpening using Smart Sharpen filter

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