New York Grand Central in Golden Light

New York Grand Central In Golden Light

Grand Central in New York – a must for photographers coming to New York. I didn’t have much time in New York, but I’m glad that I got the opportunity to see the Grand Central. It’s totally awesome.

About the processing

It’s a 9 shot HDR ranging from -5 to +3 with 1 EV step between each shot. My problem was, that the window in the middle has very strong sunlight coming in. So strong, that it spills over the walls and really ruins the photo. Even though I manage to capture all of the darkest and brigtest parts. In the processing in Photomatix, it turned out to be a gray and very ugly wall around the window in the middle, ruined by the sunlight. Even if the window it self is perfect. Finally I got the idea to use a ‘sunlight’ filter in one of my Photoshop plugins, to turn white grayish light golden and also reflect the golden color on the floor. That worked!

Tip: Pseudo HDR

Pantheon Reflecting the Sun Setting

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.