If you visited the blog right now, you definitively already noticed that it looks a little differently. As I shown in a photo few days ago, this is a planed update I’ve been working for a while now. Actually I do this almost at the beginning of every year, trying to give the blog a more modern look. So you may be asking whats new? What is changed? The following things:

1. New color scheme. I wanted to try something new this time, so a dark purple theme with pink highlights. It’s really something unusual for me.
2. New full screen header with a slideshow. It fits nicely to every windows and screen size, and even looks good on a 34 inch screen. The header also includes the menu, and a list of latest posts. Btw. the header is only on the main page.
3. New permanent menu. The top menu is now permanent, and is the main gateway to all of the blogs parts.
4. Reduced sidebar. It became so huge in last year, so I thought it was time to make it a little more compact, including only few items. Also all of those items were reduced in size.
5. Infinite-scroll. The blog now continually loads new posts while you scroll down. You can still jump to a specific page if you add page/number/ after the blog adress, but I’m looking for a better way to give you the ability to choose between infinite scroll and pagination.
6. Re-formated pages. I re-formated some of the pages, and there still more I need to correct. I’m opting for a more cleaner look, with the pages more fitted to the browser window.
7. Removed maps. You will see that new posts will no longer include embeded maps. This should shorten the loading times of the blog. Instead of maps, posts will include GPS coordinates, that you can just enter into Google maps, or directly links to Google maps with the location already entered.
8. New display for EXIF. From now on, if you see a i symbol in the corner of a photo, that means that you can view the EXIF of that photo. Just hover over the i symbol, and it will appear. This function will only by in recent posts, as the formating is different for older ones.
9. Tweaked responsive layout. You will notice that the page reformats itself sooner, to fit better to the window size.

There are many more tweaks here and there, but you probably don’t need a list of them all here :) There is a possibility that there are few errors here and there, so if you find anything not working, feel free to let me know. And also let me know what do you think of the new look. I do hope you will like it :)

For a while I wanted to start backing up my photos also online. I have everything stored twice at different external hard drives, but I think thats not enough. I still needed a good cloud solution. So looking around, there were few requirements, based on which I choosen.

1. unlimited storage – since I keep also the .psd files, the backup folder grows in size quite quickly
2. support for files over 2gb – a psd file of a ponorama can quickly go over 3 or 4 gigabites in size
3. easy access from all platforms – an app just for some platforms is not enough
4. provided by a bigger, stable company – one can find usually cheaper solution from startups, but I prefer a company with a much smaller chance of going out of business
5. manual backup – I have no need for a complete backup of my HDD. All I need to backup are certain folders.
6. online only files – I wanted to have the ability to keep some files only on-line, with no local copy after upload
7. reasonable price – as always, the cheaper the better :)
8. anything more is a bonus :)

So with this in my, in the end I chosen Office 365. This is of course not a backup solution, but a software subscription. But since Microsoft gives and unlimited Onedrive storage to every subscription of Office 365 (it’s promoted as a 1TB storage on the site, but if you look through new announcements, it has been announced a while ago, that there is no limit anymore), this became a great way to backup files. Recently the maximum size of file one can upload changed from 2gb to 10gb, which is great for those huge PSD files and from my searching, the only limit right now on the service, is of 20 000 files per account. But this should be also lifted soon.

The price of the service is also really good. You can get the Office 365 personal starting at 69 usd/eur a year, but if you don’t buy it directly from Microsoft, you can find it much cheaper. Took mi only few minutes to find a 50% off deal on the Internet, and maybe there are even better I missed. This is a very acceptable price, and you even get a copy of Office with it.

Right now I’m in the uploading process, which will take some time, as my PSD folder is over 600gb in size. But once that’s done, I can sleep a little better, knowing everything is in the cloud. The only thing I don’t like, is that you cant have folders outside of the Onedrive folder uploaded automatically in the background. Either you move things into the Onedrive folder, or just upload them using the website.

Do you backup you photos in the cloud? If yes, what service do you use?

I really was missing green when looking through my recently posted photos. So I went through my old photos, to find one I haven’t edited yet, that includes some nature. And I really had to go really far back. Somehow I took no photos in the woods last year. But it’s not such a surprise with the horrible weather that was here last year.

This is a HDR from 3 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 4, Camera Model: Canon EOS 7D, Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3.5, Focal length: 10mm, Aperture: 8, Middle exposure time: 1/80s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.387551, 19.044024

For this Mondays process post, lets look at how this 7 star reflection photo was put together. As I already mentioned before (and you can see immediately from the screenshots), this reflection is of course fake. But that does not make the photo worse, just a little unreal And if you want more about how exactly I make the reflection, check out this reflection tutorial.

Now let’s look at the photo. As you can see, I not only did the reflection, but I had to correct the color and add a lot of detail and contrast.

Finished photo

Original photo

So as always, I started in Lightroom. Here I loaded all the 4 exposures form this photo, and corrected the white ballance, to get the desired color. Other than that, I only removed chromatic abberations, lens vignetting and a little noise.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

After that, I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. Loaded all the exposures, merged them, and just added strenght, detail and contrast. From there I loaded everything into Photoshp and did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. -1Ev to darken few lights on the buildings.
3. -2EV to darken few remaining higlights.
4+5. Brightened 0EV to remove a little ghosting due to a passing ship.
6. Color Efex pro contrast, to get more detail and overall contrast in the photo.
7. Merged copy of the image, moved up to allign with the center of the image.
8. Another copy, flipped for the reflection.
9. Duplicate of the flipped copy, with motion blur applied.
10. A stretched version of the water from the original photo, set to low opacity, to add little more waves to the image. I masked it out where the building were, as it looked strange.
11. Little contrast in few areas.
12. Color Efex tonal contrast, to pull out more detail from the Burj Al Arab.
13. Color Efex pro contrast once more, as I wanted to pull out more detail.
14+15. Added more contrast to the whole photo.
16. Desaturated the photo a touch, as it was too colorful.

Oloneo Photoengine

Edit 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:

I was a little busy today, so no new photo here. But instead, how about a little teaser for an upcoming visual change of this blog? :)