I have delved deep into my Lightroom archive for this one - taken in 2001 on a trip to Japan with Canon. I brought with me a Canon D30 (anyone remember them? - a 3 megapixel APS-C sensor DSLR, Canon's first non-professional market DSLR) and I mainly used it with a Canon L-series 17-35mm wide angle zoom, but of course this was effectively a 27-56mm zoom. Because memory cards were so small in capacity back then and RAW processing software practically non-existent, I didn't bother with RAW, so all my shots were JPEGs.
I wasn't sure about exposure and it was not a very bright day so I bracketed exposure with three shots and I have used these three shots in Photoshop CS6 using Merge to HDR Pro. And this is the basic result with no further adjustments:
There are several problems to deal with. The 17-35, frankly, wasn't one of Canon's best lenses and there is quite a lot of barrel distortion and it's not as sharp as we expect of lenses today, but of course this lens was developed for film, not digital. The three combined frames have also caused ghosting of the leaves of the overhanging foliage as they moved in the wind.
I removed the overhanging foliage, including the bough that hung in front of part of the shrine's roof - that took quite a bit of fiddling about with cutting and pasting and transforming bits of roof detail. This time CS6's normally excellent content aware fill couldn't deliver a smooth rendition of the deleted area of roof.
Then the edited image was sent back to Lightroom where I corrected the distortion, realigned the horizontal aspect, cropped and adjusted tone and exposure.
In my opinion this was never going to look that good in colour so I converted to mono and adjusted grey tones using the colour sliders for colour to mono conversion. And here is the result:
This image probably means more to me than anyone else because I visited the place (unfortunately I didn't make a not of where, but I will do some investigation and update here if I found out where this is).
Ian
Linear Mode
