And we have here another Tuesday, so another process post. For today I chose this photo of the Apollo bridge I took last month. So lets get to it.

For this photo:

I took 5 exposures. Here you can see the middle one:

I then loaded all into Lightroom, where I corrected the horizon line and removed chromatic aberrations and lens distortions.

Then I exported the images as 16bit Tiff files and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. I changed only the Strength and Contrast, to get to the result I wanted there.

After that I loaded all the original files and the Photoengine result and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. -2EV exposure, to darken few of the bright spots there were still in the photo
3. +1EV to add the highlights on the stones
4. Color efext Pro contrast to brighten and add more contrast to the photo. I then used a layer mask to remove it from the brightest spots.
5. Medium contrast painted only onto the water
6. Linear contrast to the whole image.

And that’s all I did.

I can’t wait until they repair this bridge and it again will be accessible. It should look a little different, and be a tram bridge, not a road bridge. I already plan to get a nice long exposure during the blue hour, with the trap creating a light trail through the whole bridge :)

This is an older shot, from when I was testing the HOYA ND400 filter. That’s the reason why the water is so nice as its from a 32 second exposure. This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine from 6 exposures (I did the +3EV for the bridge) and finished in Photoshop.

Strange to see the winter over, with only one week of snow after us. Not that the winters in Bratislava are very cold, but usually we get at least few weeks of snow. Funny, that last year, and the year before, I had problems with my travels due to heavy snowing. This year, of course, when I don’t travel this month, no snow in sight. But I got few photos with the little snow, and here is one.

This is a manual blend from three exposures.

I never tried to shoot stars in the middle of a city, and I haven’t seen many photographers doing it either. But after the experiment I posted two days ago, I thought I give it another try. Of course shooting just stars does not work that well, but shooting star trails works much better. You don’t need to have so many stars visible in the shot, to be able to get visible star trails after blending.

As this was only an experiment, I was really not sure if I get something usable. The sky looked so clear, until we got to the spot, and then few almost invisible clouds started moving across the sky (I seen them only when checking the photos). But still, I seen enough stars on the shots, to give it a try. Next time I just need to take many more shots, as the trails are shorter than I hoped for.

This is a blend of 48 exposures for the sky (30s, f2.8 and ISO 100), and additional 8 exposure HDR for the foreground.

It’s so nice to have something repeating in a photo. It’s even better when it’s something nicer than just pillars, but if there is nothing else, they also do nicely. Here of course they also create a nice vanishing point.

This is a manual blend from 5 exposures (-3 to +1), taken at the Strahov stadium in Prague.