"The Old Anatomicum" Creating a Photo Step by Step
Yesterday I made this photo. It's a photo of the Old Anatomicum of Tartu University which is roughly 200 years old. It recently got renovated. I took this picture at midnight. It's a composition of 3 separate pictures. The weather was windy and there was mild rainfall.
The original pictures looked like this:
I edited each picture in Lightroom. The first picture was a good base picture. It had most dark areas nice and bright. The second pictures was edited to get the foreground and parts of the tree. I liked the dark shadows in the grass. The third image was to recover overexposed parts on the building.
After Editing them in Lightroom the images looked like this:
I exported all images as layers into Photoshop and started blending them together. I mixed the grass from the first two images and used the tree trunk from picture 2. I blended the third picture on all overexposed areas and used a color mask to bring back color. In the end I added a high pass filter to sharpen the whole image. (Before you do any that, be sure to align all layers.)
Every step as a GIF:
After Photoshop I took the image back to Lightroom and removed lens distortions. I also increased contrast and clarity in the sky and gave it a blue tint. I really like how the droplets of water on my lens paint hexagons onto the sky.
Then I gave it a final polish in ColorEfex2. I brought out some detail in the facade and added a blueish glow to upper left corner, on the tree and on the right side facade to fake a moon glow.
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Some great post-processing skills going on there! Well done.
Thx!
Thanks for the helpful explanation--the result is stunning too!
Lovely! Do you use the HDR function in your camera? Or do you prefer to capture various images by changing the exposure levels?
I don't use HDR.
Very cool description of your process. Did you shoot at different apertures to do a type of focus stacking? Or was it just to get different exposures? I've never done a composite image like this at different apertures, just different shutter speeds to blend exposure.
Never done focus stacking. Just used it to get a dark exposure. Maybe i'll give it a try next time.