St Patrick's Cathedral - New York City

Had a wonderful 3-day weekend in New York City with my best friend and fellow photo-nut, Dori.  Lucky for me, she lives just off Central Park on Broadway.  We spent the weekend walk, talking, drinking and shooting.  Not necessarily in that order.

I was really hoping to have my D700 for this trip, but I still do not have the money – so I made the best of it with my D80.

One of our photowalks was to St Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was a hike-and-a-half from her place on Broadway, but so worth it.  Especially after walking through an exceptionally snowy Central Park.

Anyhow, at St Patrick’s, I knew I wanted to do some fisheye and some 10mm shots with my Sigma.  Posted here is an example of my 10mm Sigma shot. It was simply amazing in here.  I took over 100 photos of the walls and ceiling and am slowly going through them to clean em up.

I really expected to do all these in HDR as well, but know what, I am not.  The HDR on these looks way to fake.  The details you see here are a combination of white-balance and contrasting.  I’ll tell you how.

Tonal Contrasting

Tonal contrast is what some call “pseudo-HDR” – but it is really about brining out the details of a single RAW image.  No blending, no multiple exposures.  Just a single image.

To do this, I first off-loaded my RAW file in Lightroom.  There was no need for adjusting the crop – this is where it sat – propped up against Dori’s Canon.  (As one friend on Flickr said, now we know what Canon’s are good for!)  Anyhow, in Lightroom, I set the white-balance to daylight to give the room a golden glow.  Then sent it off to Photoshop for the touches.

Color Efex 3 Settings

In Photoshop, I opened up NIK Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 to contrast the lights and darks. You can see the settings I used just to the right. It was very subtle.  I did not touch the Highlights, nudged the Shadows and gave the most contrast to the Midtones.  But as you can see, just barely.

After that, I did a line & curve adjustment for balance and added a highpass filter to make up for the limited sharpness of my D80.  Again, it was a very minimal pass.

That was it.

The above image is the result of slightly less than one minute of processing from camera to export.  And without any HDR.

I do really like the look and feel of tonemapping over HDR in many instances.  Especially in architecture.  But for things like nature, I prefer the use of HDR to bring out the light as seen by the naked eye.

I have a ton more shots to see on my pro page (Raymond Larose Photography) and will be posting a new image daily on my fun page (Flickr).