Malahide Castle

January 25, 2014

I normally use RawStudio for processing the camera raw files, and in most cases I can quickly get a great result.  Sometimes things need a little more work... For this shot of Malahide Castle near Dublin I was disappointed with the low variability in the grey sky, which was not as I had remembered it, so I went a little further... I used 'Luminance HDR' to do a single-image HDR tonemapping selecting the Fattal algorithm because it gave the best feel to the clouds without having any strong edge-artifacts around the high-contrast of the castle walls and other foreground. I then exported this to a second jpg with the same resolution as the one from RawStudio. I loaded the two images into separate layers in The Gimp, adjusting the transparency of the HDR layer until it all 'felt right' - in this case that was at around 66%.