Where the Kings Rest

Taking a break from my recent trilogy of Dubai pictures, today's picture finds us in historic Europe, more specifically the Polish city of Krakow. This is Wawel Cathedral, within the huge Wawel hill grounds, one of the key places for tourists to visit when venturing into this part of Poland. The cathedral is one of the most important historic buildings within Poland, being the burial sight of many Polish kings since the medieval age. More recently, it is also the resting place of Lech Kaczynski and his wife, who were both tragically killed in an air crash on 10th April 2010. He was the President of Poland at the time.

I have mentioned in the last couple of months how I am very influenced recently by the work of Serge Ramelli and Glyn Dewis, and that continues to be the case. Their compositing style of creating pictures has intrigued me to think where I can take a photograph during post-processing, and I have used compositing techniques to complete this picture. Whether you call it a photograph or digital art, does not matter to me.

You can see the original file below and compare the 2 pictures together by clicking on one of them, and then using the arrows to flick between them. The original below is still at the point where I have cropped, adjusted and prepared the file before exporting it to Photoshop. I didn't think it would be a good comparison to compare the finished version with the untouched RAW file.

Although the sky in the original is not bad, it lacks colour or character, so I replaced it with a red evening sky I pictured recently. As you can see, I have also eliminated (in a nice digital way) all the people within the picture. This was probably the most painstaking and pixel level work I have done in Photoshop yet. I then added the birds from a stock photo, carried out some adjustment work in Topaz Clarity, and finally added a colour filter in Nik Color Efex Pro.

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. I am slightly concerned about the water levels outside my apartment (we are on the ground floor) due to the recent onslaught of rain we have had in England recently. I don't think I remember visiting a shop that sells sandbags, so hopefully it won't come to that. Will be back here on Tuesday with another picture from Dubai.