Statue of Jeremiah on the trumeau of the Eglise Abbatiale de Moissac, Moissac (Tarn-et-Garonne)

This HDR rescued a very difficult set of shots, no one of which even approaches

acceptability. From a content point of view, please compare this image of Jeremiah with

the image of Isaiah in Souillac (same gallery). Though the two abbey churches are 85

miles apart, it looks like the same sculptor did the work on both extraordinary pieces from

the 12th century.

Dennis, both are great sculptures. Maybe I will see Moissac at last next June (I am going to visit France next year). I will try to do something interesting with Romanesque sculpture and architecture if I have a chance/time but I will probably convert everything to B&W later. The chance is that I will do the same with some of my earlier photos.

The composition is nice here but the fact that the face is out of focus is a disappointement. Anyway having seen these two photos of yours I am more and more convinced that B&W is the proper choice for Romanesque architecture and sculpture.

... yes, the face is soft, but the reason I posted the shot was to demonstrate how extraordinarily HDR works with sculpture. In this case, the original were unusable. Here is a strip of the three color originals with the problem backlighting. Let me know your thoughts on this process.

The Isiaih sculpture is just north in Souilliac.

Dennis, to be honest I do not see any reason for doing HDR here. HDR is useful when the contrast is large but here we have just the opposite situation. I do not understand fully your intention but I could quite easily get what you have here post-processing each of the original files attached in Photoshop. First I would set the white and black point in the levels. Then I would probably use the light/shadow but I would have to see the result of levels correction. After that I would convert the photo to B@W using Channel Mixer and finally I would adjust the contrast precisely with the curves. Before sharpening I would probably use Unsharp Mask with large radius (100-200) and small amount (5-15%) to increase local contrasts. That would give a similar effect that you have got here.

For post-processing the three attached images are almost identical. Each one of them contains the same information - just in the different parts of the histogram.