The Docks – Palermo, Italy (HDR)
The story of this photo

View the Before-and-After Comparison to see where this photo comes from!
This was shot as we slowly floated into the harbor of Palermo, Italy on the AIDAbella cruise ship. When I was shooting this, I was bracketing the shot as usual. But I did not think that I would get these shots aligned properly as there was a parallax effect since I was moving. I was quite surprised that Photomatix somehow managed to cope with this. This is another proof for my most important rule: Always bracket, no matter what! 🙂
How it was shot
- Taken handheld [details]
- Camera: Nikon D90
- Lens: Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3,5-5,6G ED VR
- Details can be found here
How it was tonemapped
- HDR creation and tonemapping using Photomatix Pro 4.0 (Detail Enhancer)
- 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 water, the sky and the rest of the photo with different strength [details]
- Saturation layer on the sky (master)
- Saturation layer on the clouds (slight desaturation)
- Levels layer on the clouds (increase of contrast)
- Saturation layer on the water (master)
- Curves layer on the water (more contrast to enhance the reflective look)
- Levels layer on the docks etc. (slight increase of contrast)
- Saturation layer on the docks etc. (master)
- Saturation layer on the foreground dock and some ships (slight desaturation)
- Sharpening using the high-pass filter (different strengths on the water and on the rest of the photo) [details]
- Watermarking
Fantastic piece of work.