Pantheon Vertorama Paris Final Image

This was my second day in Paris and start of my first full day. For my first Photo Shoot I headed for The Pantheon which is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church and to house relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens.

There is an enormormous space  inside and I wanted to try and capture this with a Vertorama composed of 6 images. There was a lot of overlap between images, probably more than 50%.

The 6 RAW images were first opened in Camera Raw and edited there to improve them using sliders including fill light, contrast, recovery for highlights, vibrance  and clarity. After the first one was done I opened subsequent ones and clicked on a little icon to the right of the heading Basic which brings up a dropdown menu including “use previous conversion” to apply the same settings as the first one which saved time

The images were combined using Photoshop CS5 photomerge in the auto setting. This is meant for panoramas but works vertically just as well.

Then the tiff was opened in Camera Raw and 3 tiff images were created by adjusting exposures being -2EV 0EV and +2EV for HDR.

Photomatix

Outputted in Photomatix to detail enhancer. Click the Camera name top right on the flickr page for Exif details and the settings used.

Photoshop

First used Topaz adjust with a duplicate layer bring detail back using HDR presets Dynamic Pop 1. A layer mask was used to bring down the effect in some areas mainly the floor.

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance with layer masks used to exclude highlights with a brush.

To bring down a too yellow look in the lower part of the picture a Vibrance adjustment layer was used with with a Vibrance decrease of 41 points and a black layer mask and white brush used to apply the effect at varying opacities mainly to lower part of the picture.

Further colour adjustments were made to colours in various areas with Saturation and Colour Balance layers with layer masks.

Due to the photomerge process there were some blank areas in the picture left there to avoid cropping too much. These were dealt with by cloning at the top and cropping at the bottom. There was also one area on the left which would not work well with cloning and I wanted to keep for the symmetry. I dealt with this by selecting the similar area on the right of the image using minimal feathering of 1 pixel for a sharp edge. Copying it to a new blank image. Then using Edit-Transform-Flip Horizontal to create a mirror image of the selection. The Selection was then copied to the original image and the Move tool used to move it to the left side of the picture and line up. The clone tool was used to tidy edges.

First duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening.

Second duplicate layer for clarity effect, extra pop to the image using Unsharp mask with settings of amount 92 and radius 92 using a layer mask to exclude highlights.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original, then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

 Original at 0EV after Photomerge

Pantheon Vertorama Original

 Tonemapped image for HDR

Pantheon Vertorama Tonemapped

 Final Image

Pantheon Vertorama Paris Final Image

 Edwin Jones