And we got to another Monday, so let’s get to another before/after process post. For today I chosen this photo of Dubai Marina (which you see every-time you visit this blog :) ), so let’s first take a lot at the finished, and the starting photo.

 
As you can see from the original photo, I could have probably gone even without HDR, but that’s just not what I do :). So what I needed to correct few areas, and overall color.

So I started as always, in Lightroom, correcting lens distortion, the crooked horizon and chromatic aberrations. Then I continued into Oloneo Photoengine, where I combined the exposures.

 
AFter that I contineud in Photoshop. Loading the Photoengine result, together with the original exposures. There I did the following edits (layers numbered form bottom up)

1. Photoengine result
2. -2EV exposure, to darken the strong highlight in the photo
3+4+5. -1EV, 0EV and +1EV exposures, to correct the ghosting from the moving cars
6. I expanded the photo a little one the top and filled it with the sky. This is so the buildings don’t touch the edge of the photo.
7. Merged version with few spots retouched, for instance, I got a little bit of the skyscraper I was on in the corner, which I didn’t like there.
8. Added contrast to the photo
9. First color balance to try and remove the overall purple hue.
10. De-saturated a little the yellow colors, mostly visible on the streets.
11. Second color balance to tweak highlights a little.
12. Changed the hue for the very strong neon lights in the front
13. I usually don’t use the chanel mixer, but the colors were still to purple, so a little less blue and more green in the red chanel helped here.
14. A little more overall desaturation of the blue colors.
15. And to finish a little brightening of the dark areas, using curves and a luminosity selection.

 
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: