HDR panorama of 1920'ies Amsterdam building

[sybren]

This photo was taken at the Hembrugstraat in Amsterdam. This building is from the 1920s in the Amsterdamse School style, designed by architect Michel de Klerk. Older photos can be seen at Beeldbank Amsterdam.

From Wikipedia: In 1901 a new law was signed called the Woningwet. The purpose of this law was to improve housing conditions in large cities in the Netherlands and especially Amsterdam. Through this new law corporations, whose purpose it was to built affordable houses, were eligible to receive financial support from the central Dutch government.

Back then, buildings like these were built for people who couldn't afford much. I wish they had the same sense of style now as they did then.

To make this photo I shot a total of nine photos, three bracketed shots at three different positions. I applied lens distortion correction and chromatic aberration correction in Bibble Pro, ensuring that I turned off the default sharpening. The sharpening is something that should be done after all processing, so definitely not before the HDR and stitching process. As much cloud detail as possible was recovered from the highlights using Bibble Pro's excellent Highlight Recovery feature. The photos were then exported as 16-bit TIFF files.

To stitch them together I used Hugin. First I allowed it to figure out the control points themselves. After that, I cleaned them up by removing points that were too close together, or that were placed at moving clouds or tree branches. I continued to add more points until the result was satisfying. Hugin can automatically take care of the HDR process for you when photos of different exposures overlap. The result is a very pleasing, natural looking HDR photo. If you do HDR as a trick to get some cartoon-like, over saturated look, then Hugin is not for you. If you use HDR to get a higher dynamic range and make your digital camera a bit more like an analogue camera then Hugin does a terrific job.

After Hugin created a panorama for me, I loaded it into Cinepaint to crop it and apply a slight curve adjustment. Cinepaint has quite a bad user interface, but it handles 16 bit TIFF files (The Gimp only goes up to 8 bit, but hopefully it won't take long to support 16 bits and more). With Cinepaint I saved the photo as 8 bit JPEG to be able to plug it back into Bibble Pro. The plugin "Andy" was used to convert it to black and white. To get the look right, I applied an orange filter by removing all of the blue and half of the green. This brought the brightness of the blue sky nicely back to the brightness of the red bricks. Noise Ninja took care of some noise reduction and Unsharp Masking.

Camera: Canon EOS 350D
Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm F/3.5-4.5 USM
Exposures: 1/100, 1/200 and 1/400 at F/8

[Solver]

Thanks for putting in all that effort. It's a great shot.

[myfotoguy]

Great shot without overdoing the HDR!. HDR and Panorama are on my list for shots to get experience with. I have yet to give it a go.

[sybren]

I'm glad that you like it. If you want to experiment with HDR, panoramas or even HDR panoramas, check out Hugin Tutorials