I started editing a new photo today, but I just got so pissed off at the new Photoshop. While they claim it is faster than the old one, in my few hours of experience, it was buggy, slow, didn’t redraw properly and overall was just horrible. And working with that is just no pleasure, no pleasure at all. If I knew it will be this way, I would not update at all.

I just noticed there is already an update available, which is not really a surprise with whats the state of it, but with such a professional software, I was hoping for better quality (and looking how good the older releases were).

So no new photo today, just a repost of one of my recent videos, on how to take multiple brackets on the Sony a7R.

Let’s look at how one of my recent photos was edited. Today I will show you this night shot with star trails, I took few weeks ago in Vienna. So let’s start.

Finished photo

Original photo

For this photo I took over 200 exposures. First I took two hours worth of 30s shots for the stars. As the Sony a7R does not have an intervalometer in it, what I did was, I set the camera to continuous shooting and locked in the shutter button on the remote. It worked without any issues. For each of these photos, I corrected the lens distortion, chromatic aberations and white ballance in Lightroom.

Exposures for Star trails

Corrected in Lightroom

I also took 3 additional exposures, each with shorter times, for all the lights in the scene. I did the same corrections in Lightroom on them as for all the other photos.

Exposures for HDR

Corrected in Lightroom

I exported all as tiff files, and started with creating the star trails. As loading them all at once would probably kill my computer, I loaded them in 20 image stacks, where I only changed all to lighten blend mode and flattened them into one layer. While doing that, I also masked out few parts from the right, as there was the setting moon and it created a little glow.

From there I blended in the darker exposures to correct the few lights and removed the few people that were in the shot. To get the final look, I corrected out the fisheye distortion, added Color efex detail extractor and Pro contrast to make the stars more visible. I finished the edit with more saturation in the blue, and overall contrast.

Blended star trails

Finished photo

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:

And to finish this week, another panorama, from another bad weather evening :) This time it’s again the Charles bridge, but from the other side.

This is a 2 tile panorama, each tile from 5 exposures.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*5, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 24mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 5.0s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 50.08624, 14.41349

How about another panorama from Prague, this time the Charles bridge. As I mentioned yesterday, I didn’t had that much luck with weather, but with so many low clouds, they can give quite a lot of reflected light, making so everything look more yellow, which can also be quite an interesting look :)

This is a two tile panorama, each tile from 5 exposures. All combined in PTgui, then Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop. For the exact process, feel free to check out my HDR panoramas guide here.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*5, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 24mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 8.0s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 50.08647, 14.40938

So I got back from Prague yesterday, and while my trip was not really that lucky for nice weather, I at least got few night shots (and mostly panoramas :)). So let’s start with one, of the Prague castle, taken right before a heavy storm started, and we had to run for shelter :)

This is a 2 tile panorama, each one from 3 exposures. Most of the shot is from a single exposure, with the bright building of the castle blended in from a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 48mm, Aperture: 7.1, Middle exposure time: 13.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 50.08441, 14.41323