Trinity 7 HDR test

This church has such an amazing range of tones and textures, from the flat mosaic-like

patterns on the gold wall to the rich woods to the wonderful Oliver LaFarge murals and the

stained glass. Difficult to shoot conventionally and a challenge for HDR. Took quite a few

tries to get it even to this state. Please comment, very interested as I am planning to do

more of this in the future.

Dennis, for me it is quite successful and convincing. But the image is a little bit soft. Use some sharpening with a white halo reduction (dark palette dominates here so it is better to avoid white halos). You can do this with CS2 intelligent sharpening or through the two sharpened layers, one merged with the background with darken blending mode and the second merged with lighten blending mode but with less opacity - you can adjust the opacity according to your preference.

Here is my proposition for sharpening.

.... went back to the original and it does have a bit of softness, unlike the others. Maybe I moved the tripod slightly in the setup. I'll check the originals with an overlay and get back to you.

... originals seem sharp. I may have done too much of the microcontrast smoothing on this version.

What's not to like? This is stunningly beautiful. The detail is amazing, as is the lighting. Capturing the stain glass & the interior as detailed as you have, is no easy task :)

 

I too love the interior of old churches. I feel inexplicably drawn to them. I've lived here in KY for about 18 years. A few years after we moved here I discovered a small church in a very small town, about 17 miles from our home. I was blown away by it's interior beauty. I tried several times to photograph the interior, never to my liking :) This reminds me of this church. When I photographed this church, it was years ago & I only had a very low resolution digital camera. I found it impossible to capture the beauty. Now that I have a much better camera, You have inspired me to return & try, try again :) Thank you!

 

 

... as you can surely tell from my portfolio, Jayme. The project to shoot them is something I've been doing for a few years, and will go back next year to "finish", at least, officially. But I'll shoot them for the rest of my life. This shoot was a test for the new (to me) HDR technique, which can easily solve the dynamic range problem you've identified in shooting churches. We got permission to go in before hours and shoot anywhere we wanted, which was wonderful. In experimenting with the HDR, I decided that it was more appealing to me to render as naturalistically as possible, so this group of shots was the practice set. In my Romanesque 2007 folder there are two or three HDR's, but for the most part it wasn't necessary.

 

I remember a couple of your church shots, Jayme, one a very interesting shot perpindicular to the pews toward the windows in the side wall and the other a 1600 iso shot. Keep shooting the churches, and I'll keep looking at the shots, as well as others. Thanks for your comments, and I look forward to hearing more from you.

I'm very surprised by the extreme low ratings on this photo. Really I don't understand it. Maybe I'm the wrong one but for me this is a great work in HDR.Congrats Dennis