And we got to another post in my processing series. For today I have chosen a photo taken at night from the Burj Khalifa. So let’s take a look at it.

To get this final photo

I started with 4 exposures in Lightroom. I could have taken the usual 5, but as you can see, I had no need for it.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure.

In Lightroom I corrected the horizon line, white balance, chromatic abberations, noise and tweaked a little the shadows and vibrance.

Then I exported all the exposures as 16-bit Tiff files and opened them in Oloneo Photoengine. Changing the strength and contrast, I got this result.

As you can see, it lacks a little contrast, there are reflections visible (the photo was taken through a glass wall) and some areas are still too bright. I loaded the Oloneo result and the original exposures into Photoshop, and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. Oloneo result
2+3. 0EV exposure, darkened by one stop with a painted mask, to remove all the ghosting from teh HDR merge
4. -1EV exposure with a painted mask, to darken the bottom center area
5. few spots darkened from the -2EV exposure
6. merged layers on which I removed the reflection visible in the sky
7. Color Efex Pro contrast to get more local contrast in the photo
8. added more overall contrast
9. added more detail, by using the high pass filter
10+11. there were few bright areas after the pro contrast filter, so I corrected those from the -1EV and -2EV exposure
12. added a little more overall contrast
13. removed the glow in the top right corner, I just didn’t like it there

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: