Wow.. how quickly the week has passed again. With all the stuff around the contest and the new newsletter, it was over in a second. But again we are at a Tuesday, so we are at another process post.

For today I chosen for you a photo from Maribor, Slovania. As you will see the original photo had quite a good exposure already, so I only had to correct few things to make it a little more interesting.

So to get to this photo:

I started as I always do, with few tweaks in Lightroom. I corrected the horizon, so it’s nice and leveled. Then I corrected the white balance, removed lens distortions and chromatic aberrations and added a little noise reduction.

After that I loaded all the files into Photoshop and did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposure to start with
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and lights in the photo
3. -2EV exposure to darken the brightest lights
4. +1EV exposure to brighten the bridge
5. +2EV exposure to brighten the bridge even more
6. Color efex Pro contrast to correct the colors and add more local contrst
7+8. Added glow to the photo (view my tutorial on this)
9. Brightened the shadow dark’s as I felt the bridge was still too dark.
10. Sharpened the photo using high pass filtering

And that’s all for this photo. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.