I would so love to go out to take some nice winter photos, but not only there is no snow in Bratislava, but it’s even raining right now. So it looks like there will be now snow again this year, or probably not until Christmas. So I’m going through my last years Christmas time photos, where there was also no snow, but at least also no rain :)

This is a HDR form 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. Photo taken in front of the Eurovea Shopping center.

Hope you all had a nice Monday, and as almost every Monday, I’m going to show you how I edited one of my photos. For today I chosen this one from London, from the Westminster bridge to be exact. So let’s take a look.

For this photo I didn’t want to do any drastic edits, so I chosen to use manual blending. I wanted to add more contrast and color, and also make it a little warmer.

Finished photo

Original photo

First I did few tweaks in Lightroom. I changed the white balance and removed the lens distortion. I also added a little vibrance. From there I loaded all the exposures into Photoshop layers.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

First in Photoshop I had to deal with the distortion. Here I used the Perspective crop tool to cut away parts from the top left and right corners, until I got a straingt image. Then I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. I started with the -1 exposure, as there I liked the sky the most
2. Corrected the highlits from the -2 exposure.
3. Brightened the dark parts form the 0 exposure.
4. Brightened the deep shadows from the +1 exposures. I haven’t used the +2 in the end.
5. A little contrast to the Basic midtones
6+7. Added glow to the photo
8. Color Efex Pro contrast to get more local contrast and detail into the photo
9. I did’t like how the light from the lamp transitioned into the sky, so I created a blured copy of the photo and blended parts of it in, to create a nicer glow.
10. Noise reduction for the sky.
11. Little more contrast to the Basic midtones
12. Brightening and contrast to the Dark areas of the photo.
13. Little more overall contrast.

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:

A little refresher for those who already seen this video, and a reminder for those who haven’t seen it yet :)

Christmas is quickly getting closer and as I haven’t yet posted any photo with a Christmas tree, here is one. This is from last year, as I haven’t taken any new photos this December, but I think the tree is there again exactly as it was then :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

How about a small tutorial for today. Today I’m going to show you how I use Dodge & Burn to correct problems with layers masks and luminance selections.

The problem

If you use mask, you have probably noticed a situation, where they just don’t select only what you want. It’s mostly visible around the horizon line, around buildings and similar. When you start to blend, it will just create ugly halos around objects. This is because the mask does not fit the area perfectly, and you also effect a bit of the surrounded areas.

Similar, if you for instance try to select an object with a lot of empty space in between (like for instance the Eiffel tower), this also results in a lot of unwanted selections.

In this example screen-shot, I created a darks mask, to select the buildings. But as you can see, part of the selection are also the clouds, which I didn’t want to include. I hope it’s visible, as it is quite faint.

The solution

You can of course just take the brush and paint out the unwanted areas, or try and select just them and fill them in, but using Dodge & Burn is just quicker. First to remember, burn makes pixels darker, dodge brighter. So when correcting a layer mask, one needs to use Burn on Shadows when trying to remove parts from the mask, and Dodge on Highlights when trying to add more to the mask.

Here, I used Burn at 100% strength and just went over the sky. As it was set to Shadows, it only took the darkest areas (the sky in this instance) and made them even darker. The bright areas of the building were not effected at all, or only very gently. If I wanted to do the opposite, select the buildings more than they are, I would go with Dodge and Highlighs. They would get brighter in the selection, so selected to a bigger degree. Doing this few times, can create a very strong contrast between the selected and unselected areas, but the transition will not be the best. If you use this gently, you will keep the original transition between light and dark areas.