I’ve been neglecting the process posts recently. The reason is simple, they take longer to put together, and I’ve been a little busier with other stuff. But let’s look at one of my recent photos, and how it was edited :)

This photo is from Arnhem in Netherlands, and is one of my very few photos taken with a fish eye lens.

Finished photo

Original photo

As you can see from the finished to original comparison, the 0EV exposure was quite dark. This was mostly due to very strong light of the bridge, and the camera of course compensated for that. Additionally, it was a little more distorted than I liked.

So as usually I started with all the exposures in Lightroom. Here I only partially removed the lens distortion and removed the chromatic aberations. From here I continued in Oloneo Photoengine.

All exposures

Tweaked in Lightroom

Right here you can see how different the image looked only with few tweak in Photoengine. I still needed to correct few things, so I loaded the result and all the original exposures into Photoshop. First I cropped the image, to get rid of most of the visible parts of the lens in the corners. Then I did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +2EV exposure, to brighten few areas around the horizon.
3. -2EV exposure, to darken the light on the bridge and the oversaturated green
4. merged copy, on which I retouched out the rest of the visible parts of the lens
5. brightened the ship from the +1EV
6. brightened the lights from the +2EV, to make them more visible
7. darkened the bridge pillar as it was too bright in the HDR, here I replaced it from the 0EV exposure
8. little bit of Color Efex Pro Contrast, to get more definition in the photo
9. little bit of Color Efex Tonal Contrast, to get more local contrast between objects in the photo
10. recovered few bright spot (result of Color Efex) from the -1EV exposure
11. once again repaired the bright light on the pillar from the -2EV

Merged in Oloneo

Finished 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: