Take me to Istanbul (HDR Panorama)
The story of this photo

Take a look at the Before-and-after comparison for this image
Floating into the Bosporus towards Istanbul with a cruise ship is an amazing experience. What a city this is. Unfortunately, we had not-so-nice weather with quite heavy rain and low-hanging clouds. But still, this is a great place. But there is something good in every bad thing: The rain actually contributed to this night panorama by making the deck of you ship nice and shiny.
This is a HDR panorama composed of 30 exposures showing a portion of our ship in the Istanbul harbor.
Enjoy!
How it was shot
- Taken from a tripod with a simple pano adapter [details]
- 10×3 autobracketed shots (1.6s – 25s exposure time)
- Camera: Nikon D7000
- Lens: Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3,5-5,6G ED VR
- Details can be found here
How it was stitched and tonemapped
- CA reduction and white balance correction in ACR
- Saved the images as TIFFs
- Applied noise reduction (Topaz Denoise) to each of the source images [details]
- Resulting TIFF images were then used as input to Photomatix (Details Enhancer option)
- Stitched the 10 tone-mapped TIFFs using Photoshop
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 Infocus on the entire image for sharpening
- Saturation layer on the water (blue, cyan)
- Curves layer on the water (more contrast)
- Saturation layer on the ship (red, yellow)
- Global saturation and levels layers (fine tuning colors and contrast)
- Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]
- Watermarking [details]
nice text & pictures.
Thank you.
Very much appreciate your knowledge and trying to learn from it .Although some pictures are simply stunning,some,as picture above leaves me cold,it is HDR way overboard though I understand that most of the viewers will like it….
Hi Ivan,
Ok, fair enough! Not everybody can like every image. I am glad that you like some of my stuff, though. And I hope you will come back rgularly.
Have fun!