For this weeks process post, I will show you how I edited this sunset photo of the lighthouse on the Neusidlersee in Austria. So let’s get started.

As you can see form the comparison to the original photo, this was a perfect place to use HDR. I was shooting directly into the sunset, so the sky was quite bright, and the lighthouse was in the shadow.

Finished photo

Original photo

I took 6 exposures in total here, but while reviewing them in Photoshop, I decided not to use the brightest one. The reason for this was, that when you use Oloneo Photoengine and you include a very bright (or very dark) exposure, it will make the result much brighter than you need (or darker) and further editing is harder. So by leaving that exposure out, the result is much better, and less corrections are needed. You can easily experiment with Photoengine to see the difference.

Exposures in Lightroom

Combined in Photoengine

So I first corrected chromatic aberrations and lens distortions in Lightroom, from where I exported all the files as 16-bit tiff files. Then I loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. There I tweaked the strength, contrast and fine exposure, to get a pleasing result. From there I continued in Photoshop with the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Just a copy of the 1st layer, on which corrected the rocks in the foreground. As there was a little camera movement while I took this shot, it created an ugly ghosting around them, and I had to correct that.
3. Cleaned few dust spots in the photo
4. Used the +1EV exposure, to brighten the lighthouse.
5. A little noise reduction
6. Color balance to make the shadows a little warmer.
7. Color efex Tonal contrast to get more detail into the clouds

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: