Let’s look a the editing process of one of my recent photos today. This one is a fisheye shot, of the John Frost bridge in Arnhem, in Netherlands.

For this shot, I decided to remove the distortion completely, to see how it looks. So here you can see the final and the original exposure, side by side.

I started the edit in Lightroom. For all of the 5 exposures, I removed the lens distortion (the last Lightroom version supports the fisheye lens), removed chromatic abberations, tweaked the white balance and toned down the highlights a little. From there I exported all the exposures and merged them in Oloneo Photoengine. As always, just by changing the strength and contrast.

To finish the photo, I loaded the Photoengine result and the original exposures into Photoshop and did these edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Photoengine result
2. 0EV exposure to correct errors created by moving objects and water
3. Darkened the green area on the pillar from the -2EV exposure
4. Color efex pro contrast, to brighten the image, used more stronger on the bottom part of the image
5. A little bit of overall brightness using curves
6. A little bit of overall contrast using curves
7. Even more contrast
8. More saturation into the blue colors
9. Brightened the dark pars a little more
10. Noise reduction on the bottom part (got noise due to the fact that it was brightened a lot)
11+12. Darkened the horizont from the -2EV exposure, and saturated it more
13. Overall color balance shifted a little toward warmer colors

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: