This is one of those pictures that I really don't care if anyone likes or not, I love it, I know you shouldn't be that way about your own picture but I do, I took my son around a few art galleries and museums and he stood and looked at this painting for a while. I took the photo while he stood there and asked him what he thought, he said it was OK but he couldn't make out what it was all about.


This is a single RAW image that had been converted to HDRI and tweaked to to show the richness of the colour here.

I have been asked on a few occasions what the painting is that my son is looking at, I was that wrapped up in talking to him and taking the picture I never thought to look.

Thanks to I now know

"Rossetti! I adore that painting. "Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice". It all makes sense when you find out that Rossetti's wife killed herself by overdosing on laudanum (hence the poppies)."


<sub>Walk through:

Image taken indoors under subdued but warm lighting

Taken at 10:45 in the morning.

Canon EOS40D with a Canon 18-55mm lens, no flash but the white balance set on auto while shooting in p mode, ISO set at 800 with f/3.5 1/10s.

This was shot in RAW mode to give me an image size of 3888 X 2592 (10.1MP) 240ppi.

My son was admiring the painting as he did so I went behind and sat close to the floor to get the angle I wanted, I wanted the scale of the picture to be evident to his size, the stance he took was natural, I was lucky.

Stage one: Image put through Photomatrix Pro 2.5.4, rather than make a three image exposure HDRI if you simply open a RAW file in Photomatrix it will generate a pseudo HDR image, its as good as a multiple exposure but easier to work with. Once it has been converted I then open the Tonemapping menu within Photomatrix, I then in this took the temperature to the warmer side but only slightly, I reduced the saturation once again only slightly on both the main and under the shadows and highlights. Contrast was set to full and smoothing was also. I had lighting strength sat at very high. I wanted to bring out the richness of the colours without gaining too much noise (a problem with HDRI) so the alterations where minimal in here.

Stage two: Image is then opened in Lightroom, preset "Punch" was selected, this was them altered by knocking it back slightly, exposure dropped two settings, fill light taken up and darks taken up two places, vignetting was added but only enough to draw the eye to the centre of the image, the image was then adjusted further by increasing the highlights and shadows but only slightly. Image was then exported into PS CS3.

Stage three: In CS3 the first thing I did was to straighten the image up, I was slightly off line, this is simply done by selecting the image and then hitting control and T, realign the image and then crop. I then used the plug in Digital Film Lab and under Diffusion I set it to white 5, once done I knocked this back to 25% in CS3 under the edit tab.

Stage four: was simply the framing of the image in CS3, this is down to taste, some like framing, others don't, I like to frame my images as I feel it sets them off.

It was after I uploaded the image someone pointed out a label on the left hand side of the painted detracted from the image, it was a bright label designed for children to look at, normally to remove anything like this I would use the the clone stamp to take it out followed by the healing brush but because of the intricateness of the wallpaper this would not have worked, instead I took one of the picture tags already on the wall and overlayed it above the other, using the eraser brush I took anything over that did not fit and soften the edge of the label with the blur brush.

This is probably the image I have done the least post editing on as I didn't want to take away from the content too much. All in all the post editing took just over a couple of hours.



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All my works are ©Mike Shaw Photography and cannot be reproduced, altered, uploaded, printed or used in any other way without my written consent first, please respect this and you may find I may be a lot more willing to help and share.</sub>