There's a new element to my novice HDR photography this week, and ideally, you won't even notice it until I describe it.
This is the pipe organ in the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere, the St. James Church in the capital of St. Helena Island, Jamestown. St. Helena is one of the most remote islands in the world. It's about 800 miles west of Angola in the South Atlantic Ocean and, with no airport, several days away from the rest of the world by ship.
The St. James Church sits just inside the harbor fortifications in Jamestown, across the street from the castle and adjacent to H M Prison. No one was about when I let myself in that morning. I had the whole church to myself for twenty minutes of picture taking, and this one is my favorite. It's from a single RAW image, tone-mapped in Photomatix and finished in Photoshop.
The new element? I'll show you after the jump, where you'll also find the original RAW, non-HDR photo for comparison.And click on the photo above for a much larger view.
(We visited St. Helena and Ascension islands in January. Stories and related items here, and the photos are in the St. Helena Island Gallery and the Ascension Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the EarthPhotos HDR Gallery.)
The new element is a faint layer of texture. In Photoshop, I added a new layer, then used Filter/Render/Fibers and blended that layer at just 8% opacity. It's all basic stuff for the pros, but it's a whole new world for me.
Have a look at the photo at the top, with texture, and compare it to this, which is the same photo prior to using the texture tool:
And the original photo, after a little cleaning up in Photoshop:
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