Who's at the door

[binu.george]

Snapped this pic of my husband at the St. Philomena's church in Mysore, India. The exteriors of the church were very blown out, while the area of the picture with my husband was rightly exposed.
So I tried my hand at restoring it using the HDR technique. Here's what I did.
1. I selected the exteriors of the church, and applied "levels" to reduce the exposure.
2. While doing so, I saw that the plants and the gate required lesser exposure adjustment. But this would leave the arch still overexposed.
3. So next I chose only the parts that need more exposure correction, and applied the "levels" correction yet again.
4. Continued to select over exposed portions and apply "levels" correction till the whole picture looked as best exposed as possible.
5. All this couldn't help restore the bottom over exposed steps. So I cropped that out, resulting in the picture attached.



Comments/critique are welcome.

--Binu

[AlexisM]

I don't really have any critique for you, but I wanted to say that you did an amazing job of bringing back the color and detail! Great shot!

[areeffbee]

You did a fantastic job!

[ocnsprt]

You did a great job bringing the church to life, and reducing the exposure while maintianing detail, but it now looks like you inserted a picture of your husband into another picture of the church bc the lighting and color saturations are so different between the church walls and doorway and inside the doorway where your husband stand. Try doing an unsharp mask over your husband and perhaps a little selective saturation to make him pop and fit in with the rest of the picture... good work though

[binu.george]

thanks Alexis, areeffbee and ocnsprt.
@ocnsprt - I did what you mentioned, and the results are definitely a lot better. Here is the edited pic.

[zarquon]

Very nice, I like how vibrant the colors are

[binu.george]

thanks zarquon.

[Turtlefish]

that's a nice fix on the church

[AlieS]

That looks great! I am definately going to keep that trick to use in the future!