Old building

Tip: Pseudo HDR

Pantheon Reflecting the Sun Setting

Pantheon is one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen and I was even rewarded with the most beautiful sunset.

The photo is an old one, shot with my ancient Canon 400D. How to salvage an old photo? I took this photo as a single RAW on my old Canon 400D using a Sigma 10-20mm lens. I didn’t have a tripod, but the light was so gorgeous I just had to shoot the scene. What I did was to stand as still as I could and just fire away 20 shots hoping one would be sharp enough. The ISO I had turned up to 400, which is the highest acceptable ISO on that camera, and I the raised the f-stop to the highest value the lens allowed (lowest number). That gave me a shutter speed of 1/13 seconds, which requires a very steady hand. But I managed.

Tip: Try making Pseudo HDR photos from single exposure RAWs
In the processing had to major issues. I had to get a better balance between light and shadows and to increase the sharpness. To get better balance between the shadows and the light areas, I made a Pseudo HDR photo. To do that I made in Lightroom two artificial exposures by making virtual copies. One I made a -2 and the other I made +2. These to exposures I gave some strong noise reduction, and then I exported all three to Photomatix and tone mapped them. The result was awesome. Not as good as if I had shot three proper bracketed shots, but good enough.

The sharpness I achieved by duplicating the layer in Photoshop and then applying a fairly strong Unsharp Mask (really a bad name for a sharpening rool). That did some really good things to the roof of the Pantheon. I blended in the good parts of the sharpened image – the rest I didn’t use.

The Royal Stables

Right behind the Govermental building Christiansborg lies the Royal Stables. The Queen has got a set of white horses, which apparently are rare, if they have to be really white. The horses stays in the building in the left.

About the processing
This is a typically double tone mapped HDR. I created it from 5 exposures in Photomatix. The double tone mapping gives this much more painterly and surreal style, which works well for some images. The idea of the double tone mapping is that, you first do one HDR photo and tone map it, and the image that you get from that process, you tone map too. This is done by pressing the “Tone mapping” button once more. A side effect of the double tone mapping is, that you get a lot more noise (grain) into the image. You have to clean some of it up, but not all. The noise adds some of the grittyness to the image, which is part of the effect.

The second time you tone map, the colors go crazy, and you have to lower the saturation. The luminosity you also want to bring far down. Exactly how far depends on your photo. But this step is what creates the mood of your photo. Try some of the other sliders, and see how they affect your photo.

I brought the double tone mapped image into Photoshop and did a lot of clean up and some noise reduction here. I took the sky from one of the original shots and masked that in. If you are unsure of how to mask/blend layers in Photoshop, have a look at my tutorial on blending layers.

The spider at the gates of the old Citadel

In the middle of the old center of Copenhagen lies an old citadel. The military still uses it, but there is public access. This is the exit tunnel on a cold winter’s day. I only got 4 of my 5 shots for HDR, because I had to run for my life, because a car came.

This is an 4 HDR photo (-2 to +1). I have worked this image quite a bit. First I did two tone mapped images in Photomatix. When I got the first one I closed the “final touch” dialog (I rarely use that), saved the first tone mapped image. Then I simply press tone mapping button once more. This gives a wildly colored image, so I have to lower the saturation to somewhere in the mid 40’s, and then I lower the luminosity to the minus area. This really gets the grittiness out of the image. In some places too much, but this I fixed in Photoshop later.

In Photoshop I blended in the lamps from the -2 image, and the closest area to the lamp in front comes from the single tone mapped image. The double tone mapped was burned out. The same goes with the cobbles in the road down in the middle. They burned out too in the double tone mapped image, so I had to take approximately 25% of the single tone mapped. Then I had to extract blue colors in Photoshop to get the right light outside (mark the layer and CTRL + U. and select the blue color and lower the saturation).

University of Copenhagen

This is the main building of the University from 1836. The University has fostered a few known people, one of the more famous is Hans Christian Oersted, who discovered elektro magnitism in 1820. This particular photo I took on 22nd of December 2012. I have been waiting to take it, but the square in front is always crowded with people, busses, cars etc. But this day, only one single car was there.

It’s a single RAW file that I have tonemapped to achieve this result.

The kings library

In Kolding in Denmark lies an old ruin of a royal castle. The oldest parts dates back to the 12th century. One of the most famous kings of Denmark Christian IV spent most of his childhood in this castle, and many kings liked the castle a lot. In 1808 a wild fire burned large parts of castle more or less to the ground and left it as a ruin. In 1830 H.C. Andersen (the guy with the Ugly Duckling) advocated for keeping the ruin. Many years later the castle was delicately restored, in a very unusual way. This picture I took in the library, in one of the parts of castle that pretty much survived the fire. If I had dared I had moved the table just a tiny bit, but there were alarms everywhere like in any museum, at it said ‘do not touch’ everywhere too, so I didn’t move it.
The photo is a single RAW shot with an X100, and then I tonemapped it and did a few other things to it.

Huge watch in great building

This is the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. It is a Mekka for photographers. It is very beautiful with all it’s tiles, skylight roof and 100s a small shops with all kinds of goodies. They even have a couple of danish specialities. And then they have these two great watches hanging. This one has got a small ship going round and around. It is on the right hand side on the photo.
I found the building by using Stuck in Customs iPad app Stuck on Earth. However I had only just entered the door and touched my tripod, when tripod police showed up and said ‘Sorry – no tripods’. Damn… So I had to my shots hand held, which not too big a problem on this one, because of the railing, but other ones were bad.

Caught In Pixels