Welcome to the 26th edition of the Points of View Photo Project here at Jason D. Moore Photography!

This week’s source image came from regular contributor, Henrik Demey from Belgium. About the photo, he writes:

“This picture was taken during a city trip to Prague, Czechia. It shows the central interior of the Saint Nicholas Church, on the Old Town Square. This baroque church dates from 1735.”

Thanks for sharing your shot with us, Hendrik! If any of you would like to share one of your shots with us to use as our source image in an upcoming week, please send it to me at pov@jasondmoore.com and you may see it in the next few weeks.

And now, onto this week’s contributions!

Let’s start with the image’s creator, Hendrik:

In order to resque this picture, I used Lightzone and Photoshop CS4. IMHO Lightzone excells in rescuing these too dark pictures while keeping enough contrast between dark and light regions.

Lightzone phase:

1. Relight tool twice, in order to lighten up the picture, while keeping the highlights on the central candles; increasing “fuzz” setting in this Relight tool to sharpen the candles

2. Slight increase in vibrance and luminosity

Photoshop phase:

1. opened image in ACR, improved vibrance and clarity slightly

2. nik Color Efex: Pro Contrast

3. nik DFine noise reduction twice!

4. nik DFine to remove hot pixels

5. Ouptut sharpening using nik Sharpener

6. Curves tool to fine tune contrast and color balance

Now, from newcomer Joan Hoffman:

I uploaded the image into camera raw and adjusted the exposure and used the recovery slider then adjusted the black slider and fill light slider to eliminate clipping.

I then opened in PS8 and rotated the image and used the camera distortion filter to center the chandalier, and cropped.  layered and adjusted the highlights, shadows and contrast, flattened, then applied a filter in Topaz clean (and sorry forgot which one… ack!)

Thanks for joining us this time, Joan! Hope to see more in the coming weeks!

From Will Dickerson:

Well i used the “cool text” effect that you had recently posted to give me the rays….

and a lighting effect for the chandelier…

blended it with a punched up version and adjusted curves..

.added some fake twinkles and a slight brush effect…stroked it and rotated

And, finally, my take on it:

There isn’t a whole lot to tell about this one. I did some initial processing in Lightroom 2.6, opened the file up in Photoshop and applied a filter in Topaz Adjust.

I then selected the top area with a gradient in Quick Mask and applied a slight lens blur to the selected area.

Finally, I duplicated the image, switched the blend more to “Linear Burn”, made a rectangular selection about 10-20% in from the edges, feathered the edges of the selection and hit “Delete” to give it a nice vignette.

And that was it!

If you would like to participate in next week’s edition of the Points of View Project, simply download the image to the right, process it however you like, and send it back to me by next Thursday, March 4 at 8pm EST for inclusion. Send it in to pov@jasondmoore.com.

Good Luck!