Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore

A shot of the Duomo lit by sunlight, taken while ascending the Campanile Bell Tower. I'm just amazed by the marbles covering this building. It was truly a magnificent architecture. More on this cathedral in my previous post.

 

Some technical details of this photo - It is actually a composite of a HDR composite and RAW image. The buildings were part of the HDR composite, while the skies and clouds were from the 0 EV exposure. The skies from the HDR was too much for my taste so i stacked the HDR composite with the 0EV shot in CS5 and the skies were masked out to get the normal exposed skies. I decided to go for HDR for the buildings because the lower left side corner were quite dark due to the shadows from the clouds and the bell tower. With HDR i could get the whole dynamic range instead of having dark dull shadow tones at that area. The skies were later adjusted by applying a soft-light layer of high contrast black and white image of the same shot with reduced opacity.

 

 

Recommended to view large on a dark background. Simply press "L" on your keyboard.

.

.

.

HDR Tonemapped and Digital Blending DRI

3 exposures +/-2 EV at aperture f/8 @11 mm

Blended manually with original exposures

Post processing and Adjustments in Photoshop CS5

 

 

Done