I’ve been doing a little housekeeping, going back through older material looking for stuff from Italy that I liked but wasn’t happy with. This is a useful exercise as there are often images that I couldn’t process to my satisfaction, but with upgraded software I can do a much better job of getting what I want from the image. This image from the Vatican Museum exit ramp is a good example.The original images (3 bracketed shots) were hand held and out of register. Not just a simple shift, but rotated and my HDR processing software, either Nik HDR efex or Photomatix Pro couldn’t handle it. I recently updated the Photomatix software and it did a much better job of fixing the registration, allowing me to complete the image. I like this shot of the spiral ramp as it’s different from the more common shot taken from above. I used Nik Dfine noise reduction on it to kill some high ISO noise and got the image to really pop. I’m pleased with the result.
This second image taken in Rome looking over the Tiber river was another image I struggled to get a satisfactory result from.
This one is the output from Nik HDR Efex. I love this program for it’s presets. Great place to start an HDR image from and then tweak away. It’s not as good as Photomatix for fixing shifts and ghosts, so often the output from Photomatix is cleaner. I wish I could take the HDR 32 bit file from photomatix and tone map it in HDR Efex, but the Nik software doesn’t allow that. Shame really.
More to come…
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