For the few last week there were no processing posts, but from today I’m getting back to my normal posting schedule. So Monday will again be dedicated to editing. Today, let’s look at one of my Christmas themed photos, taken at the Eurovea shopping center in Bratislava.
Here you have the final and the original photos in comparison. The photo was just too dark, there were many moving people in the background and also the statue was not shiny enough for what I wanted.
Finished photo
Original photoAs alway I started in Lightroom. Corrected the lens distortions, chromatic aberrations and white balance. I also re-cropped the photo a little, to get rid of the letters on the side. From there I exported everything as 16-bit tiff files, and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine.
All exposures photo
Lightroom editIn Photoengine I put all the brackets together, just tweaking the strenght, exposure and contrast. Then I loaded all the exposures into Photoshop. I didn’t need that many edits, mostly just to remove the blurred people. So I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2-8. Original exposures, each one tweaked using curves and hue/saturation, to be similar to the Photoengine result. The I painted in the parts I wanted to use from them to hide all the people.
9. Merged copy, on which I removed noise and all the dust spots. I also removed few more people, the weren’t moving in between the exposures.
10. Color Efex Pro contrast to get more contrast into the photo
11. Color Efex Darken/Lighten center, to darker the corners and brighten the center.
Photoengine edit
Photoshop editAnd 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:
Hey Miro,
great blog you have there! Been following it for quite a while now.
I’m just wondering with this photo as to how you made the sculpture in the middle ‘pop’ that much. I take it that you didn’t blend in an original exposure but used ColorEfex for it. Was it a simple Tonal Contrast filter for the highlights there or something more elaborate?
Cheers,
Lorenz
Hi Lorenz. Thank you first of all :) And that pop is a result of Pro contrast with the Darken/Lighten center. It just makes it more contrasty and brighter. I don’t use Tonal contrast that much.
Cool, thanks a lot!
Yeah, I’m always very careful with the Tonal Contrast, too — it’s so easy to totally overshoot it with this one! And the default values are just awfully high.You don’t know a trick to change them, do you? ;-)
No. I haven’t seen any way to change the defaults. But what you can do, is to create a recipe, which is something like a copy of the filter, with your own settings. So you can use that instead of the filter.
Well, that might actually be the way to go. Sad but true… I’ll give it a try.