I usually don’t take many photos like this. As in HDR you tend to expand the dynamic range to capture everything, this goes completely the other way. But as I was standing there an taking photos, this couple moved exactly between me and the sunset, and I just had to take this shot. I even took only one bracket, as I knew that this would be a silhouette and nothing else. I also left the foreground a little brighter than complete black, so you can see where they were standing. It’s actually on top of a hill above Hainburg in Austria. It’s a really nice place with a great view, just a little dangerous after dark. You have to be quite careful not to fall down :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

And another week passed and again I’m have for you another process post. For today I chosen this view of the St. Martins cathedral in Bratislava. So lets get started.

My goal in this photo was to open up the surrounding of the cathedral, so it’s not just black and you see some detail there. So to get this final result:

I first corrected the lens distortion and chromatic abberations in ligtrom. Then I exported all the 5 exposures as layers into Photoshop and continued from there. The layers I used vere (numbered from bottom up):

1. 0EV exposure used as base
2. -1EV exposure used to bring down the overexposed areas of the cathedral (I’m inluding here how the mask looks, so you can see what effect it has, if you don’t understand layer masks, check out this guide I written about them)

3. -2EV exposure, to correct few more overexposed areas
4. +1EV exposure, to brighten the overall image
5. +2EV exposure, to brigten few more parts and to add light trails to the road (again I’m including an image here, so you see how it looks)

6. added more detail using a high pass layer
7. I reouched out the small piece of the sky visible in the right corner, it just bothered me there
8. added 0.5 exposure to the whole image, except the brightest parts
9. Color efex pro contrast to add more local contrast to the image
10. color balance for the trees in the foreground as they were too red
11. Color efex Darkne/Lighten center to add a vignete to the photo
12. levels to add a little contrast
13. desaturated the oversaturated yellows
14. added glow (check out my tutorial on this)
15. brightened the shadow darks
16. made the image a little colder
17. darkened the extreme highlights

And that was all. I actually stopped after step 11 at first, but that added the few more tweaks, as I was not completly sattisfied with the result.

Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

Sometime not even the blue hour gets you a blue sky. Especially whet it only stopped raining a short while ago. But all the clouds still reflect the street light, which can mad the whole scene yellow. Sometimes it looks quite interesting.

Same here, at 5am in the morning in Ljubljana. It was quite cold and the streets were still vet. But the photo came out quite nicely. This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine from 5 exposures and then blended with some of the original brackets in Photoshop.

After all those city shots I really wanted to add a nature photo. But looking through my recent photos I just could not find any that fit. So I vent back, and back and even more back, until I got to my photos form 2011, and there I found one :)

This is a HDR created from 3 exposures in Oloeno photoengine and finished in Photoshop.

Google +

Recently I’ve been using my tablet more, and so I have been playing more with different apps, and one of the was the recent Google+ app. And I have to say, compared to Facebook, it was much better. It was such a pleasure to use, that I decided to start again posting my photos there. So if you are there, feel free to add me under http://plus.google.com/+MiroslavPetrasko

City jungle

It’s so nice to see so many trees inside a city center. It makes the city shots so much greener, even if they stand in the way sometime of a nice composition. Here I wanted to get a nice shot of the Cobblers Bridge, just could not find a spot with a nice view next to it. So I took one from a little further away from a nearby pedestrian bridge. But as that one was shaking like crazy every time someone walked over it, I had to get it in the very early morning.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.