Henley on Thames - Town Hall

[ChrisH]

I would welcome comments on my images of Henley Town Hall.

The image above is a straight forward edit done this morning.

The image below is the original HDR version that did not fair well in a recent mini competition,

I would be interested to know which versions you prefer and any suggestions on how I can improve either image.

[dubaiphil]

That brings back memories - I used to play for Henley C.C.

Where's Worrall-Thompson, with plenty of cheese tucked under his coat...?

I'm not a fan of the pseudo HDR version, mind you. The original looks a little over exposed on my (admittedly rubbish) work laptop, so dialing back the exposure if you shot in RAW would be preferable to my eyes over the HDR version. There's not a great dynamic range in the original shot to use HDR to bring back shadow detail anyway, which is possibly a reason why it didn't fare too well in the mini comp

[dje]

Hi Chris

I agree with Phil. Just out of interest I played with it in ACR and wound back the Exposure by 1.5 stops and increased the Contrast to 20. For some reason this seemd to over-saturate the blue sky so I wound back the blue saturation. Overall this made quite a difference to the image.

It's a rather attractive Town Hall and Square and a nice composition.

Dave

[Geoff F]

I remember that one from the competitions, Chris.

My first thoughts were; the scene looks a little squarish with that rather square looking main building placed centrally. However, the difference in height between buildings on each side does help to mitigate this.

The flag, on top of the Town Hall looks somewhat 'artificial' to me. The trees on the right tend to over complicate the scene, and HDR does tend to exaggerate this. But all in all, I was reasonably happy with the image.

The non HDR version does overcome my concerns, but at the expense of highlight detail.

Possibly, this is another case where I would have made two Raw conversions with different settings then combined them using a mask.

[ChrisH]

Thanks Guys for your helpful comments.

Dave - I have tried your suggestions, which has produced the image below.

Geoff - The flag was a problem as I had to remove an aerial in front of the flag pole.

[Aforns]

Hi Christopher The pseudo hdr does have better blues and tones overall, like the composition showing the area around it.

On the last re post the sky does not look correct? .. even the first one has a funky blue color Might check in PS for color cast in general.

[dje]

Chris your last edit didn't turn out like mine. I'm not sure why but I had another look and played round a bit more. This is what I came up with (hope you don't mind me posting this). Settings in ACR were as follows (bear in mind these are settings applied to your original jpeg, not your raw file)

Exposure -1.0
Contrast +28
Highlights -60
Whites -40
HSL/Grayscale
Hue : Blues +28
Saturation : Blues -75
Luminance : Blues +19

For some reason, the blue sky needed fiddling to get a realistic colour.



Hope this is of some help
Dave

[ChrisH]

Thanks Dave - I will try out your settings.