LightningPaul

A lovely view of the old city Brugge, in Belgium. Made during the visit at Europa College.


TECH-INFO: I used a tripod to shoot 7 images. The dynamic range was pretty high. After RAW converting and lens correcting in DxO Optics I merged them into a HDR file. It was tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and afterwards processed in Photoshop.
In the latter program I enhanced contrasts (something which you normally always must do after tone-mapping). On the sky I applied a gradual neutral density filter effect. I didn't put it fully horizontal because the sun was coming from the right. While enhancing the image I noticed that the colors of the reflections in the water were nice: at the left more blue at the right orange. I amplified the effect using a cooling and warming filter. Finally on top of one of the windows was a label "On Sale" hanging. That was pretty disturbing. Most people and almost all Photography magazines I have read advice the use the clone stamp (in Photoshop). I tried it again but it's so hard to do it right. In fact it doesn't work for me. Instead I made a selection, which is a bit bigger than the label, of the neighbor window. I feather my selection for 5 pixels, to prevent hard edges. Then I copy the selection to a new layer. At the end I move the copied window (with some surrounding wall) over the label. Very easy, very fast, very good result. I call it plastic surgery (perhaps better: pixel surgery)