There was no process post last week, but there will be one today. And I will show you how I edited this long exposure shot of the SNP bridge in Bratislava. I took this photo using a 10 stop ND lens, so that changed the look quite a bit. But I still have to tweak a lot of things, so let’s look at exactly what I did.

Finished photo

Original photo

I started in Lightroom with 5 exposures. I could have done the same with less, as most of the image is quite uniform, but I tend to take more just to be sure I have enough. In Lightroom I corrected the lens distortion, chromatic abberations, and tweaked the white balance, to get a much warmer feel to the photo. From there I exported everything into Photoengine.

Used exposures

Lightroom tweaks

I didn’t did much in Photoengine. All I needed is to adjust the strength and the contrast to get to where I wanted to be with this photo. Then I just loaded it into Photoshop and continued from there (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Olonoe Photoengine result
2. I removed dust spots and the visible part of a ship from the photo
3. Removed the cables visible in the bottom part of the image (normally I would move the camera to avoid them, but it was not possible here)
4. Removed few visible people on the bridge.
5. Brightened the inside part of the bridge a little from the +2EV exposure
6+7. Corrected a waving flag from the -2EV exposure, which I brightened using curves
8. Color Efex Briliance/Warmith to add more color to the sunset
9. Color Efex Pro contrast to add more local contrast to most of the photo
10. Removed a little noise from the sky
11. Brightened the windows on the building, to have it look more shiny
12. Added more overall contrast
13. Added more saturation on the blues, for the sky and the water reflection

If you seen my other process posts, you will notice that I almost always end with adding more contrast. The reason is, that sharpening a photo will remove a little contrast, and I prepare the photo for that.

Merged in Photoengine

Photoshop edit

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: