Windsor Castle in HDR

Windsor Castle by Neil Alexander (Click to view larger)

Earlier in the summer we had a family jaunt down to Legoland in Windsor, and swung by Windsor Castle on the way back. It was a bright and sunny couple of days, hardly ideal for photography, but you make the best of what you can. Windsor castle and gardens are such a lovely environment that I felt compelled to make some photographs. So how did I manage to make the image above in such harsh conditions. It was a challenge.

The first stop was to capture a bracketed range of images spanning 5 stops to make an HDR image. Unfortunately 5 stops wasn’t quite enough and in even my darkest image the sky was blown out (See 2 stops under below). Merging the sequence in Photomatix Pro produced the basic HDR file in the second row below. Using the sky from an image I made at Legoland the previous day, I layered these in Photoshop and with a Layer Mask, brought the sky into the image. I then re-edited the first image (2 stops under) by bringing the recovery slider right up in Lightroom which managed to salvage some definition in the sky. I then added this as another layer and masked this in. This allowed me to add a little more reality to the sky and produce the final image above. All in all about 90 minutes work with a lot of trial and error, but knowing where I wanted to end up always helps.

Windsor Castle - 2 stops under	Windsor Castle – base exposure	Windsor Castle - 2 stops over
Windsor Castle by Neil Alexander - basic raw HDR straight from Photomatix	Sky before layering with Castle	Basic HDR layered with the sky

That’s all for today – hope it all makes sense. Any questions? Feel free to hit me in the comments or ping me an email.
TTFN

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2011 at 12:08 pm. It is filed under Landscapes, Photographs and tagged with hdr, howto, Landscape, Tips, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.