LightningPaul

The Casa Mila building in Barcelona. Totally worthwhile to visit. Especially if you are interested in the genius architect Antoni Gaudi. Personally I'm a big fan of great architecture.


TECH-INFO: I had no tripod with me, so I shot 5 JPGs hand held with each a stop difference. I had to take multiple pictures because the lower part of the building was in the shadow but the top part was still brightly lit by the sun. So all the other tourist will have badly exposed pictures, unless they were working in RAW to fix at home.
First I did lens corrections in DxO. Then I used Photoshop to auto-align and merge them into a HDR file. I saved the HDR file, in a .EXR file, so I can watch it later when we will all have real HDR screens (which might be the next big thing after the current High Definition hype).
To be able to view the image properly on our screens I tone-mapped it with Photomatrix. I tried several settings but finally I took the one looking most natural. Now the second part of the fun starts: I used multiple masked adjustment layers like: curves, brightness/contrast, selective color tools and vibrance/saturation. With the brush I paint on the layers to enhance different parts of image. The main changes were: making the sky darker by adding more blue and cyan, brightening the whites which enhances the clouds and the walls, darkening the blacks on various parts of the wall and the balconies, enhancing contrast and saturation on certain places of the wall, brightening the building and adding a rectangular vignette. On the later I also painted so it's not perfectly rectangular anymore.

I have the feeling that this method of working fits me very well. I applied it already on lots of the images which I posted the last months.