Villandry — View from the belvedere | JackDesBwa | user gallery

Villandry — View from the belvedere

by JackDesBwa 2021-01-25 08:51

This is a (too-large) hyperstereo wide-angle HDR view from the belvedere in the castle of Villandry, France. Actually, the raw pictures were badly shot so that the image is a mix of compromises and edited parts. Despite its numerous problems, the scene is nice enough to share it. I hope I will be able to shoot a better picture next time I go back there.

This castle of the Loire Valley is famous for its gardens. Here we see a part of three of them: in the foreground the famous Love Garden, first part of the Ornamental Garden, in second plan is the pretty Kitchen Garden richly composed for aesthetics, on the left we see a very small portion of the second part of the Ornamental Garden. In the background before the village, there is also the Herb Garden, but we do not really see it in the photo. On the right, we see a small portion of the castle with its keep, the only part that remains from the medieval period.

Although the photo looks like the park was empty, it was not at all (people are just very small in the enormous gardens). In particular, it was hard to place the cameras with a long cable between them, so that they were not placed well. The optimal alignment gave a not pleasant image, very tilted, so that I forced some errors for better composition.
The HDR was composed with three exposures speared by 5/3EV for each eye, fused before the stereoscopic alignment process. The merge was useful mainly for the sky which was totally blown out in the central picture.
I redrew the guardrail on the bottom right, making it look far lower than it is but without visual pain, and two trees in the foreground particularly badly aligned.
There was also out-of-focus dust particle on the lens that I did not see on the field, which created a lighter zone. I warped the right image onto the left with a depth map and used this image to paint parts over the dust to reduce the rivalries.
Finally, I added a title text in the corner which also serves to draw the attention away from the edited part underneath.

-- 2018-08-15, LX5 hardware-hacked sync