Leeds Shopping – Knightsbridge of the North?

Leeds does seem to have its fair share of shops. Posh shops. Harvey Nichols. Designer stuff.

I like the shop in the Victoria Quarter with Panerai watches best – often found lusting after the PAM 372, a huge watch which looks just about perfect on my wrist… shame it’s £6000.

20mm HDR

So trialling my trusty new 20mm prime lens, I took the tripod around Briggate and the shopping area – weird light meant HDR, just to eek out a bit more detail in the clouds and dark areas.

Bracketing at -2/0/+2 EV was enough for the light conditions – no need to go silly and do 7 shots or anything like that.

Then to processing – in a nutshell…

Lightroom – basic tweaks – output 16-bit TIFFs
Photomatix – blend a few and create a preset which works
Photomatix – batch process the lot to 16-bit TIFFs
Lightroom – tweaks to colour, verticals etc.
Photoshop – more specific edits on a few of them

No ghosts!

One thing I’ve noticed with the new Photomatix 5 is that it’s better at auto-de-ghosting.

Ghosting happens a lot in HDR – if something moves between your 3 shots, you get ghosts when you blend. Think of a moving car… on shot 1 it would be on the left of the frame. Shot 2 in the middle. Shot 3 on the right. When you blend you’d normally get 3 ghost cars.

It just seems a lot better than it used to be – not perfect, but on the shots below take a look at the people.