A bit overkill, but I checked on the internet and found one picture that shows that my colors aren’t far from reality. I was really puzzled by that ocean blue on the balconies, but hey, aren’t they like that? Also, take note that a bright sunny day light comes from behind, bringing a strong blueish hue to some areas of the image.
This one results from four sets of seven 1/2 step apart exposures. After compressing each one of the sets with hdrmerge, I stacked the four resulting frames on Gimp to get rid of my camera’s traditional noise. I also used alpha channels with enfuse for the first time and, although a laborious process, I had fun with it.
To here, I’m bringing only one of the raw sets for the sake of simplicity.
These files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike
(Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike)
EDIT: Information about this church here. I quote: " African slaves provided the physical labor required to build the monastery." And lots of gold and silver inside… this is Brazil.
I decided after a few tries with LuminanceHDR on the raws that the combined noise was just too high. I ended up a bit like uncle Ernie on Tommy (google “Fiddle About”) in that I used digiKam to do an exposure merge, export as TIFF. Import TIFF into Darktable to use its awesome automatic geometry tool, save as EXR. Load into Gimp for levels, curves and an adjustment to the overal color temperature. Gmic higpass on a 25% opacity layer.
My only excuse is that the tools are all there and each have their own little tweaks I am comfortable with,
Your words, my words. 500 years under such commandments (opulence, robbery, slavery), blessed by God, is a hell of an heritage, and people think it’s past, but I’m sure it isn’t. But let’s not digress.
Thanks for the fixes. I mixed English with portuguese, which is Barroco.
I ran a 16 bit tiff output from Rawtherapee through the Nik DFine 2 plugin because it is automatic and I was lazy. I’m pretty sure you can tweak the noise reduction in Rawtherapee to get the same result, using detail recovery and curves. I like to spend my time on the colors and such.
I’m not suprised by the ocean blue balcony fencing, a color/pattern (the blue stripes) reminiscent of garments of the tribe of David, and its position aloft significant of specifically Mary’s genealogy.
Nothing fancy really. The obvious light source seems to be from the skylights. So just thought that I will create a beam of light flooding the main statue and reaching the white cloth on the altar. The rest should be darker.
To implement this, I just duplicated the layer twice, made the top layer blend mode to screen. Put in a black layer mask and used gradient tool (FG TO BG) to apply it only on the left 2/3rd of the image. Applied that mask to the image and again repeated the same with right 2/3rd selected. When I apply it, the screen blend is visible only to the middle 1/3rd. Merged down this layer.
Repeated the same till I satisfied with the result.
Since foreground and the sides are darker than the top center of the image, I feel it gives a 3D effect.
Many interesting and different interpretations, even showing that noise isn’t a bad thing necessarily
Here’s my workflow:
1 - 4 x 7 x DNG → Hdrmerge - dynamic range compression of the seven different exposures → 4 x DNG
2 - 4 x DNG → Rawtherapee - Noise reduction and bad pixels → 4 x TIF 32 bit floating point and REC2020
3 - 4 x TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020 → Gimp / G’mic → stack the 4 images (median) to reduce noise → TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020
4 - TIF 32 bits floating point and REC2020 → Photoflow - generation of 5 images at 1 EV exposure steps: -1, 0, +1, +2 and +3 → 5 16 bit TIF REC2020
5 - 5 x TIF of 16 bits REC2020 → Gimp → Create masks to highlight / conceal light/noise, embedding them as alpha channels - 5 x 16 bits TIF REC2020 with alpha channels
6 - 5 x 16 bit TIF REC2020 with alpha channels → Enfuse → New dynamic range compression with more noise elimination → 16 bit TIF REC2020
7 - 16 bit TIF REC2020 → Darktable - various final adjustments (toning, curves, noise reduction, wb, exposure, local contrast, sharpening) → 8-bit JPG sRGB
-Applied a style I have for HDR preparation, basically removing the default sharpening and adding Base Curve, Highlight Reconstruction and Lens Correction.
-Denoise (bilateral) with radius 18, red and blue channels at max and green at default. This got rid of most of the noise.
-Copied this across all images.
-Exported all to Enfuse with the ‘pseudo hdr or dff image’ plugin as 16 bit tif.
-On the resulting tif: adjust white balance, Tone Curve for added contrast and Color Contrast for added saturation. Color Zones to boost the reds and blues a bit and Color Correction to reduce a blue cast in the blacks. Crop and Rotate to make the image level.
-Then I had some extra noise reduction in Neat Image (might be considered cheating since it is not open source software?).
-final sharpening in Darktable.
.
