I braved the inclement horribly shitty weather to take some photos of the Abbey church on Eglinton Street.
As I have a terminal lack of anything to do tonight, I’m going to fill in some of my workflow on the photo. The first step is to actually get the photos from my memory card, for which I use a shell script. It does nothing exciting and I don’t accept any responsibility if it accidently dumps ten thousand photos into one folder (which happened to me). There’s not much to say for the script, it takes all the .cr2 files from the memory card and places them under ~/Pictures/Imports in a subfolder, going by today’s date – 2006-12-31.
After that, I import the photos to Lightroom:
Workflow 1
Normally I’d use the raw editor to screw with whatever aspect of the photo needed screwing with, but in this case I wanted to compose a HDR shot in Photoshop, so I just exported the three photos I wanted to tiff format and used the HDR function in Photoshop to create the final photo. I used Photomatix before, but in 90% of shots people go utterly overboard with tone mapping, which leads to a horribly fake and cartoony image, which was never to my tastes when it came to HDR. Going through the HDR group on Flickr I find this and this.
Workflow 2
Creating a HDR photo in Photoshop is insanely easy if you have good shots taken, so I’ll skip on the detailed instructions. Suffice to say, to pick File-> Automate-> Merge to HDR, click a few buttons and go get a coffee if that’s your thing. At this point I’ve composed the HDR, converted it to 16-bit for ease of work and straightened it:
Workflow 3
I’ve started working in layers where I can, I did a lot of tweaking of colours and lighting, with a little clone work for a few annoying cables and wires that were in the church:
Workflow 4
Squinting at the above picture, I had layers for the shadow/highlight tool, levels, hue/saturation, curves, colours and the channel mixer. And behold, the final shot:
Workflow 5
The Abbey
