Photographing a Beautiful Church

A couple of years ago a good friend was married here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Indianapolis. We were very early in getting to the church, and I was able to make a couple of images of it before anyone was seated. I loved how great this little church looked on the inside and out. I wanted to try and capture the church in all of its glory. With the lighting situation that meant reaching my goal by using HDR. At the time I was very limited in what I could do. In fact the wedding photos from the weekend in question were edited in a trial version of Lightroom. Lightroom has become such a part of my workflow that I cannot imagine using anything but it to work on my photos. With that said there was a time not long ago where that happened. On some Thursday’s I like to go back and re-work an old photo with some tricks that I have learned since I first tried my hand at it. This is one of those photos. I never posted this photo on this website, but a version of it appeared on my Facebook page at the time. While I think that technically in the camera at the time there were a couple of things that I could do better, I am very happy with how this image looks now.

Throwing the Processing Book at This Photo

Using Lightroom 5.5, Photoshop CC, and Photomatix Pro 5 to Edit This Photo

As the heading states this photo went through a couple of stages. Back in 2012 when I edited the photo I just ran it through Photomatix, and what came out of the program was what I had. Now I have a little different workflow that I think looks much better. To start off I sent the three exposures out of Lightroom to Photomatix to fuse them together. After Photomatix had rendered a 32 bit file I saved that file, and opened it up in Lightroom again. I have a lot of pixels to work with this way, and I can achieve my goals much easier. I applied the HDR Look preset by Matt Kloskowski to this image to start off. I then worked the sliders to get the image where I wanted it to be. Once I was happy with the photo I sent it to Photoshop to apply a finishing touch. Once the photo is in Photoshop you make a copy of your layer, and run the high pass filter on it. You don’t add a lot, but you just make sure that you can make out the edges of everything in your scene. You hit enter to apply the filter, and then adjust your layer to overlay. The high pass layer adds a hard edge to everything making them pop. I do not use this trick as often as I should as it really adds to my photos. I think that it really works in a setting like this one the best. Below is the same photo with just a simple black and white conversion applied to it. I also adjusted the exposure slightly. I really think that this one works either way.