HDR Church building

[grapnell]

Please critique this constructively. This is my first HDR composition of church building.

 

[Majeed Badizadegan]

Interesting subject. That spot at the top needs to be cloned away. There's some haloing around the tree leaves. Overall, the sky looks "worked on". Doesn't look natural, maybe saturation was pushed too far. The roofline looks a bit peculiar, like there was some clone work done around it.

The textures in the stones are nice on the building. The composition is okay. The stairs in the foreground could use better lighting, as they serve as a natural leading line to the building.

 

[Bynx]

In the processing if you moved the Highlight Smoothing to the right it should fix the sky problem. I would then make the overall image less vibrant or desaturated slightly so it all looks a little more realistic. Except for the sky I actually like the rest of it.

 

[Eneg]

Photographs that have been through the "HDR ringer" rarely, if ever, look natural. They can certainly be interesting but natural ?

 

[Trever1t]

Composition, check!

That spot of blue sky in the trees is the giveaway. Building, steps and lawn look pretty ok to me

 

[Bynx]

Photographs that have been through the "HDR ringer" rarely, if ever, look natural. They can certainly be interesting but natural ?

A typical dumb statement by someone that has seem a lot of newbie crap and doesnt know what they are talking about.

 

[grapnell]

Thanks Bynx and Rotanimod, I will try some of your suggestions and repost. The blue spot is actually something on my camera mirror. Took me a while to figure it out, because it was showing up no matter which lens I used, but I finally got it taken care of.

 

[SCraig]

Thanks Bynx and Rotanimod, I will try some of your suggestions and repost. The blue spot is actually something on my camera mirror. Took me a while to figure it out, because it was showing up no matter which lens I used, but I finally got it taken care of.

It might have been dust on your sensor assembly, but not your mirror. Anything on the mirror will not affect the image since the mirror moves out of the light path before the shutter opens.

 

[vipgraphx]

Actual processing is not bad. I really like the church. I don't mind the stairs being dark as your show casing the church and not the walkway however I would like to see how it looks with the stairs a bit brighter for comparison.

The sky does seem like you did something to it as I see some dark coming off the building which tells me there has been some cloning done in that area or spot healing. It does look like you have a little bit of clouds but can not really tell as its not working in that area at all. The dark spot you have looks to me like dust on your sensor. The other thing I see is it looks like you used that topaz filter that makes those weird shapes in the foliage which I could do with out. Its kinda cool in ht trees though maybe try masking the grass bushes and dirt back in.

 

[grapnell]

No cloning or healing was done. The reason the edge of the building looks that way is because I did a freehand/select by color/feather and then selective gaussian blur on the clouds to get rid of the noise. I think I just over-did the gaussian blur, and it spread to the edge of the building through the feathering. The image process itself is simply a mantiuk 06 with bilateral smoothing, overlaid with fattal. I think the weird shapes in the leaves may have just come through with the smoothing algorithms. I'll try to ease up on them a bit, or use them more selectively. I am open to other ideas on better processing techniques.

 

[Jaemie]

The blue spot...

It might have been dust on your sensor assembly, but not your mirror. Anything on the mirror will not affect the image since the mirror moves out of the light path before the shutter opens.

Yes. It's almost certainly something on your sensor. You're probably seeing it most often in low aperture sky images.