Notre Dame Paris Floor Level View

Back to the past with this shot of the grand interior of Notre Dame Cathedral.

I arrived fairly early, about 9.30 and as luck would have it the main Aisle was taped off still for an earlier service. This gave an ideal opportunity to get pictures free of people. Use of Tripods is forbidden in the Cathedral. However I set up a Gorillapod with its legs flat on the floor using it to get the camera at the right angle on the floor. When is a Tripod not a Tripod – when it’s not on 3 legs? Regardless I was taking pictures like this for 20 minutes and nobody objected.

I had to do a lot of test shots as the camera was far too low to look through the viewfinder. I pushed the setup a little way forward of the tape which went across the aisle and then took the HDR set with a wireless shutter release.

The picture was taken with a Tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10mm. 3 raw images 2EV spacing for HDR. Opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

Photomatix

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

Photoshop

The -2 EV image was brought in as a new layer and applied only to the windows at the far end with a layer mask and brush.

Detail brought back in with Topaz adjust with Vibrant preset group, detail 1 with some highlight areas excluded from the adjustment with a layer mask.

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance.

Vibrance increased 32 points.

Saturation adjustment layer yellows used to increase yellow saturation in the lights. Blues used to slightly decrease saturation blues in the upper windows

Brightness and contrast adjustment layer used with a layer mask to decrease brightness in the highlights.

Second Brightness and contrast adjustment layer used with a layer mask to increase overall brightness but excluding highlights.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

First duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening

Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 56 amount and 56 radius. A mask was used to exclude the effect from some highlights.

The crop tool was used to give a slight correction to the level of the picture. Hover over a corner of the crop area and move the rotate icon which appears

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

Notre Dame Paris Original

Tonemapped image

Notre Dame Paris Tonemapped

Final Image

Notre Dame Paris Floor Level View

Tip of the Day

Make good use of the History panel. This records the last 20 actions. This can be increased but uses more memory. Click an earlier item to take the image back to that state. Later actions will be greyed out but clicking on one brings the image forward. Using brushes on layers will quickly use up the History. To get round this you need to take regular snapshots. To do this click the middle of the 3 icons at the bottom of the History panel. Bear in mind that when the file is closed you loose all history and snapshots. The only way to save a permanent record of important editing stages is to save a Photoshop file with a different name with all layers to that point. This might need to be temporary as a layered Photoshop file can be up to 200 mb.

Edwin Jones