Let’s look at another photo, and how I edited it. Again I chosen one from Dubai, so here goes.

This photo was taken in the Dubai Marina, very late at night (sometime around 1am).

I did only 4 exposures here, as the +1ev was bright enough. It usually is when one take photos of a strongly lit up city. As always I loaded all the brackets into Lightroom, where I corrected the lens distortion and white balance.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure:

After that I exported all as 16-bit tiff files, and loaded into Oloneo Photoengine. Only tweaked the strength and contrast. The result from it looked like this. (you can see there is a small part of the corner missing, this is due to the lens correction, I didn’t crop it, as I could easily fill it in Photoshop)

Continuing I loaded all the files into Photoshop, starting with the Oloneo Photoengine result. There I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up)

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Blended in the foreground from the +1ev exposure
3. Blended in the highlights from the -2ev exposure
4. Merged exposure and corrected the corner and cleaned the dust spots
5. Removed the broken piece of railing that was in the shot. I didn’t notice it while shooting (it was dark) and it was too distracting there
6. Cleaned out the retouch a little more
7. Added contrast to the dark areas of the photo
8. Corrected few lights on the Cayan tower (the spiral one, they are moving, which created ghosting)
9. Color efex Skylight filter, to add more color to the photo
10. Added more contrast to few buildings
11. Removed a little bit of a glow above some of the buildings
12. Removed the glow completely. It was on few buildings in the center, which looked strange.

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

I usually go out shooting with a lot of gear. But sometimes it’s nice to go just with the camera and a single lens, and do something different. So as finally it was a little more sunny, I took a walk through the Botanical Garden here in Bratislava to take few shots. It really was quite relaxing :)

And the submission time for the Photo editing contest sponsored by OLONEO has ended. In total, 179 people joined and submitted a version of the photo provided. And now it’s time to vote. So head over to the Facebook gallery and like the one (or more) that you think are the best.

The voting ends next Sunday the 25th at Midnight CET, with the winners announced on Monday. For complete rules, please visit the contest announcement post.

Good luck everyone and a lot of votes :)

Last few hours

Only last few hours to join my photo contest. Now is the last chance. From tomorrow the voting starts :) You can get the complete description of the contest here.

Dubai Wallpapers

No new photo today, but something different. I updated the wallpapers section today with 5 new Dubai wallpapers. Two of them are huge 3840×1200, fit for two full-HD screen next to each other.

And another three for classic single screen setups.

Head over to the wallpapers page to download them, or you can also visit the wallpapers gallery on my portfolio site (just select that you want to see the original size in the bottom right of a photo, before you download from there)

Last day to join the contest

Tomorrow is the last day to post a submission to my photo editing contest, so if you still haven’t done so, now is the time. Just head over to the contest post, for all the links and rules. Good luck everyone :)

In between Jumeirah lake towers

Cant believe it’s already two months since I’ve been in Dubai. It passed by so quickly. But still have a lot of photos which I want to edit, but some are being a little more difficult that others.

This is one taken in the middle of the Jumeirah lake towers. It’s a HDR from 4 exposures created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.