For today I chosen to show you how I edited this photo from the Grand Mosques in Abu Dhabi. This was the main entrance area, so quite busy. That why I chosen this compositin, trying to look more up, so getting a shot over everyone heads. It was also a scene with quite a high dynamic range, so I used 6 exposures, with a -3EV taken for the lights.

So lets look at the final image and the original 0EV exposure.

Finished photo

Original 0EV exposure

I started as always in Ligthroom. I corrected the lens distortion, removed the chromatic aberrations and corrected the angle. After that I exported all the files as 16-bit tiff files and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine.

All exposures taken

Distortion corrected in Lightroom 

In Oloneo I just changed the strength and contrast, as I do most of the time. From there I loaded the HDR result and the original exposures into Photoshop, and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Photoengine result
2.-3EV exposure to darken the lights
3. Curves to brighten the overall image
4. Just a merged layer I needed for Color efex plugin
5. Color efex Detail extractor, to get more detail from the photo. Set to default settings and then 50% opacity.
6. Curve to darken the brightest lists in the photo.
7. Merged layer for noise reuduction
8+9. Added contrast to the whole image
10+11. Desaturated the red color and added more saturation to yellow.
12. Color balance for the shadow areas to remove the red cast.

HDR in Oloneo Potoengine

Photoshop editing

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: