Sunday, May 15, 2011

Bringing out the beauty in Albany's Cathedral

Recently, Albany's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception underwent a huge restoration.  As a matter of fact the outside of the renewal project is still going on.  Inside, the place is stunning.  But its hard in a photograph to bring out the true beauty of the place.  There are a lot of details that you can see with the naked eye (as you adjust to the darker areas) that is kind of tough for the camera to pick up.  At least in a single shot.  So, I thought this might be a good subject for the an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo.

Again, the idea for HDR is to bring up the shadows and calm down the highlights using numerous exposures.  Here's a before and after (click on the pix to make them bigger)...


To get all the detail I needed I made a total of 7 shots.  In addition to the first exposure (the before picture above), I made 6 more shots at varying degrees of under and over exposure.  Then, using a program called Photomatix, all 7 shots were merged into a single image...


After the processing the image looks a little flat, so then I went into Photoshop for some additional tweaking, upping the contrast and adjusting the colors and saturation a bit.  I was happy with the final product.  You can see a bunch of detail in the brickwork, and the bright light from the stained glass windows is not blown out.



After I took that first shot(s), I tried again with a much wider view.  I put on my 10-22mm lens and zoomed out to get as wide a shot as possible....


I wasn't quite all the way in the back, but fairly close to it.  As you can see, because I am using the super-wide lens, I have some perspective distortion going on with the pillars.  So after again combining 7 shots, I also used the Lens Correction tool in Photoshop to straighten things out...



Now, as I was going on to the next step of tweaking up the contrast, etc...  there were two little details in the shot that bothered me (they were also in the first vertical shot).  There were two large electric fans toward the front of the church.  I cloned them out as best as I could...





Again, after the final tweaking, I was pretty happy with the final result. Click on this final pic for a fairly large view...


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