I thought it’d be neat to document the making of this image:
Using a bracketed set of 3 exposures with the Ricoh GR, fitted with the GW3 wide-angle adapter. The bracket was shot hand-held while on a trip when bringing a tripod along was not really an option.
The exposures from left to right were 0, +1.7, -1.7 with the base exposure
Date and Time : 2016:03:23 12:22:12
Exposure Mode : Auto bracket
Exposure Program : Aperture priority
Exposure Time : 1/500 s
FNumber : F5.6
ISO Speed Ratings : 100
Metering Mode : Multi-segment
White Balance : Auto
First step was to align the three exposures and combine them into an HDR file directly based off the original DNG raw files to retain as much detail as possible and avoid noise and banding. This was done in LuminanceHDR and the result prior to tonemapping looks something like this :
Once tonemapped with one of LuminanceHDR’s built-in tonemapping operators, Fattal, this is our next stage:
Still a bit flat and lifeless but we can already see what the tonemapping has done to the sky vignet as well as the reflections in the building’s windows and the structure of the stone facing. Of course, due to having shot this hand-held, the building seems to lean somewhat to the right. So let’s bring the image into Digikam’s editor (still in 16-bits to retain as much image detail and quality as possible) and rotate, take care of the levels, saturation and contrast a bit.
First let’s mark the rotation by finding the axis of symmetry. I’m intentionally not allowing the software to perform an automatic crop as it would lose the bottom characteristic point of the bulding as well as probably cropping off a thin slice off the top.
And the result after rotation:
Now let’s take care of saturation, contrast and levels:
And finally, bring the image into Gimp (I’m using a beta version of the new 16-bit capable Gimp) to crop and use a combination of perspective cloning, content-aware filling and selections pasted and blended to fill in the gaps:
(Some additional minor work with the perspective clone stamp was needed on the right edge where a sliver of black still shows as well as on the bottom right stone construction but I am assuming (perspective) cloning is somewhat of a standard operations so I have not highlighted it in separate screenshots)
And there you have it! For those who work with Photoshop this will probably, possibly not be very interesting and I’m sorry for that. Some of the described Gimp stuff will certainly be applicable in Photoshop (and possibly with more ease) but I can only show what I do in Gimp in the hope it may help someone else.
