Cattedrale di Piazza Armerina

I love it when I find a hidden gem in my archives. I have been spending a lot of time perusing old photos in lieu of actual travel and stumbled across this panoramic view of the Cattedrale di Piazza Armerina watching over the town below.

With a bit of love using current technology, I was able to take a pleasant snapshot of the Cattedrale di Piazza Armerina and turn it into a work of art that I’d be proud to hang in my home.

The “Before”

Believe it or not, here is the photo I started with:

And here is is with a few quick tweaks in Lightroom:

Much better already, right? Here is what I did:

• Set White Balance to Daylight
• Auto Tone
• Enable Lens Corrections
• Transform > Auto Upright
• Crop to 16:9

Creative Processing

Once I had my base image looking pretty good, I moved on to creative edits in Luminar including a sky replacement and tone adjustments to make the city glow with warm afternoon light.

If you’d like to see exactly what I did, go over to Facebook, join the Skylum Photography Group (I’m one of the admins) and watch me edit the photo in a live recording.

Problem Solving

After I finished my creative edits, I zoomed in for a close look at the image and noticed a couple of issues.

1. It wasn’t sharp
2. The image lacked enout pixels to make a large print

Sharpen the Details

First, I worked on the sharpness with Topaz Sharpen AI. This software borders on witchcraft it is so good!

Increase the Resolution

Next, I addressed the image size. The original photo was captured with a Canon Rebel (the original one) with a whopping 6.3 megapixels. After fixing the distortion and cropping it to a 16:9 aspect ratio, I was left with a paltry 3057 x 1720 pixels. Not terrible, but not enough to print large.

After running the photograph through Topaz Gigapixel AI I was able to double my resolution and now I have an image with 6114 x 3440 pixels – plenty for a nicely sized print with BEAUTIFUL quality.

Get to know the tools

I am in awe at how this photograph turned out and I couldn’t have done it without the amazing tools I have in my photo editing toolbox.

• Lightroom Classic – my home base for image organization and basic edits
• Luminar 4 – my go-to toolbox for creative editing, including AI Sky Replacement (enter ANGANDRIEUX at checkout to save $10)
• Topaz Sharpen AI – an almost magical tool that can rescue images that are just a bit of out of focus (enter ANGANDRIEUX at checkout to save 15%)
• Topaz Gigapixel AI – A lifesaver for photos I captured years ago on low megapixel cameras (and for upsizing scanned film photos). (enter ANGANDRIEUX at checkout to save 15%)

Questions?

If you have any questions about this photo or my editing process, please let me know in the comments below or contact me directly. I’d love to hear from you!