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Stained Glass Windows


John Rostron

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Whenever I visit an old church, I try to take some photographs of the stained glass windows. The challenges they present vary. Most will need some distortion correction. Many will have variable lighting across their face. I usually try to take a bracketed series so that I can include some of the surrounding stonework.Usually I take the photographs with my old Sony A55 DSLR, but sometimes I use my Canon Powershot.

This photograph of the Great West Window of Chester Cathedral was taken at my daughters degree ceremony, when she received her PhD. I took it with the PowerShot from near the centre of the cathedral as we were all filing out. I did not have time for any bracketing, but I did take two photographs, one of the lower half and one of the upper half. Later I merged the two in Affinity Photo Merge to Panorama.

I often use AP's Perspective control, but I do find that DxO ViewPoint much easier to get the desired result, and used that here. The only other post-processing was some sharpening  and curves adjustment.

Chester Cathedral Great West Window

GreatWestWindowPanoDxO1200h.thumb.jpg.1cf753cc42379e5158120ae1aa74c9a7.jpg

Comments are welcome. I would also be pleased to see other's photographs of stained glass windows, with any commentary on the post-processing involved.

John

 

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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Hi John - you beat me to it! This was taken in Winchester Cathedral with my GX80, set to a 7 shot HDR bracket, focussing on the altar.Cathedral3.thumb.jpg.085ff54326630eb799042bbd84d8850f.jpg

Similar thing here, but I made a number of attempts to get the window properly exposed / focussed,  and completely failed!  Given the short fl I was using, the focussing should have been almost foolproof!   Post processing for both was to use a tone mapped HDR image and apply a bit of dodging to bring out some of the shadow detail.

Cathedral5.thumb.jpg.3eb5c54aad64ac6a46fc1a8402093c00.jpg

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

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These are nice images. You have got much of the architecture  well-exposed in the first, and all of it in the second. When trying to photograph large church interiors, I did try focus merging, without a great deal of success as I recall.  I mainly try to take photos of the windows now.

In the first image (is that the Lady Chapel?), the altar, the sarcophagus and the reredos all seem in focus, but not the window above. In the second, I cannot see any noticeable lack of focus.

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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2 hours ago, John Rostron said:

is that the Lady Chapel?

No, but I can't remember what it's called - possibly Bishop Langton's Chapel. I'd thought about going back and trying focus stacking, and it's still on the cards, but the first thing I'm going to do is add a ball head to my gorilla pod so that I can adjust the camera position without worrying about the whole thing falling over!  If I can get permission to use a "real" tripod, so much the better.

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

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Gloucester Cathedral Great West Window

Taken in September 2016 with my Sony A55. I started with three exposures approximately 1.5 stops apart. My recollection is that I was holding myself against a pillar to steady the camera, which is why I could not get a directly square-on image. I merged the three images in AP 1.7 beta, using the Dramatic option..I found that the stained glass window was still overexposed, so I returned to the darkest of the three original images and cut out the window and pasted it onto the merge. I did not include the two side-windows visible to the left and right, which are still overexposed. I then applied the AP Perspective correction and adjusted the aspect ratio to approximate to the real window.

552143160_WestWindowAPPlus1Persp800w.jpg.13d4c8a8614fd3eda9c1761523eb23eb.jpg

Comments and further examples welcome.

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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Nice!  That's just the sort of effect I was trying to achieve!

23 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I found that the stained glass window was still overexposed, so I returned to the darkest of the three original images and cut out the window and pasted it onto the merge.

I had exactly the same problem, but I didn't realise how bad it was until I got home - I learned a lot from my mistakes on this expedition!  Since I was using a tripod I should be able to use the same techniques used for removing ghosts in order to get the best exposure.  The game plan for my next trip is to make sure I've got at least one good shot of the window, and then take a set of exposures to get an HDR of the choir stalls etc.  

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

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