Rough Groove

Bulacan church post production

The church of Bulacan, Bulacan, though beautiful, is quite a challenge to photograph. Even with a big front fenced space and my ultrawide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22mm (16-35mm fullframe equivalent), one can’t still get a good architectural shot. Because of its bulk, width and height, framing the church in its entirety results to a tapered look, keystoning, as one is forced to tilt the camera up at an angle.

This posed a challenge. From the original above, tilted image, I converted my Canon RAW file using the Adobe Camera Raw plugin. Set the white balance to cloudy and 300dpi. I tried correcting the perspective in Photoshop with its Lens Correction filter tool under Distort. However, the resulting image, below, was flat: the belfry is just short and the entire church squat. I was disappointed. Drastic measures need to be implemented.

Ever since I’ve been reading about digital photography , I’ve been toying the idea of doing composite work: Two or more different images combined and manipulated to come up with a seamless final image. That idea is becoming a reality as the demands of the commissioned book project needs to be met.

To start, I got two vertical images (above). Shot manually with the aperture and shutter setting fixed, I set out to shoot the church, handheld. While it is advisable to use the tripod for a more balanced and vertical shot, I just trusted my hands and eye to get a straighter image.

During post production, I manually juxtaposed these two images, masked parts of the first image and joined the two. Because these were handheld shots, there was very small but negligible distortions. Using the clone tool, I seamlessly repaired the joins. The sky was then cloned and patched (one really good alternative is to have another sky image and add it to the two, but that will be next time, with another church). The banners and on the lower part of the facade were then patched. I then adjusted the curve and saturation. The final image to be submitted is below, clean and seamless. Compared with the perspective corrected image above, note that the church is not flat and squat.

A note with perspective correction: In the analog days, an expensive TS lens (tilt and shift lens) for architecturally correct shots is a must. With the advent of digital postproduction, especially using Photoshop CS2, these corrections can be done on the computer. However, in my experience with shooting churches, most of the time I will shoot these buildings parallel already so that the squat effect will be avoided. I only do perspective correction minimally or if there is no option because the space infront of the church is already too cramped. This will then be followed by doing a transform - scale to stretch it a little bit but a warning though, the image will soften.