When I was headed to Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, I was met with this from a co-worker of mine… “I know you like looking for things to shoot when you get into town.. wait till you check out the lobby of the Hilton President”
Sure enough, it did not disappoint. The Hilton took over this hotel several years ago, and the entrance was just awesome! There was detail everywhere – from the sofas in the front directly in front of the check in area, to the second floor veranda with its ornate walls and columns. Problem here was that I did not bring a tripod with me to work on any HDR – I just hadn’t expected it.
As I was checking in however, I noticed that there was a bowl of Granny Smith apples there for guests. After helping myself to one I thought “Hey.. maybe I can pull this off..”
The crew at the front desk giggled as I put the apple under the camera and fired off a series of shots into the main hallway. Giggling aside, I said “Hey.. don’t laugh.. I think this is going to come out great!” A couple of minutes later, some Photomatix, Lightroom, and Photoshop and you got the image that’s above.
The image was 5 shots; -2, -1, 0, 1, 2. The shots were then merged together in Photomatix for the HDR effect, however, like much HDR it doesnt stop there. Usually when you get the great tone in the image, the color really suffers. For that, you really need to go into Photoshop/Lightroom to finish it off.
I brought the 16bit image back into Photoshop and did some curve adjustments to remove some color casts to the image. From there, I did some selective sharpening. After that, I created a desaturated adjustment layer (not too much, maybe 10%) to get rid of some color from metallic areas in the image. 2 hours later.. you have the image that’s here. It’s still a work in progress, but i’m happy to be working on it.
