For this Monday, I selected a little easier edit I did on one of the photos I took at the Schwarzsee under Matterhorn. It’s a state holiday in Slovakia today, so why not something easier. So let’s get started.

First, lest’s look at the finished and the original photo.

Finished photo

Original exposure

It looked not so bad to start with, but I still wanted to recover more from the sky and the reflection in the water. So I took 5 exposures and in Lightroom I corrected the horizon line, and lens problems.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

From there I continued into Oloneo Photoengine. There I only changed the strength and added contrast. As I mentioned before, I very rarely change anything else here. It’s just not needed. After that I only took the Photoengine result into Photoshop to edit further (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3. Added glow to the photo, as I wanted the bright areas to shine a little more (check out my glow tutorial here)
4. Color efex pro contrast to add more local contrast to the photo and more detail
5. Curves to add a little more contrast to the photo
6. I ended up loading the 0EV here, to recover few areas, where the process created too saturated colors, mostly in the foreground.

Combined in Oloneo

Finished in Photoshop

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: