I don’t really like photos taken in the middle of very sunny days. But if I’m on a location because of something I have to take a photo of, that why not take some more. Same here with this photo from Spitz in Austria. It was just crazy sunny when I took this. It was like that for most of the last month anyway. Almost no clouds the whole time, and huge temperatures. At least it got a little colder now :)

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

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 27mm, Aperture: 14, Middle exposure time: 1/50s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.358472, 15.406886

Time to add new wallpapers again. Today it’s two new ultra wide ones in 3440×1440. Get them as usually form the wallpapers page :)

Let’s look today on one of my recent photos and how it was edited. This time it’s this late night panorama taken in Prague by the Charles bridge. This was a two tile panorama which I took without the help of a panorama head. Actually a lot of my panoramas are done this way. If you are far enough from the subject, and you are using a longer focal length, you don’t really need a panorama head. The stitching software is intelligent enough to work with the small amount of paralax effect you will get.

Here you can see bigger versions of the middle exposures I used.

Overall I used 10 exposure, I went from -2 to +2EV, as there were some quite dark areas, and also few very bright lights.

I started in Lightroom, where I only removed the chromatic aberrations, lens distortions and vignetting and corrected a little the white balance (it was too much towards red). From there I exported everything as 16-bit tiffs and loaded them into PTgui. For a detailed process how I combine shots there, check out the specific tutorial on creating HDR panoramas.

I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. As always, I just added a bit of strength, until I get a nice even exposure, from which I could start with. Setting of around 50 works the best usually. Same here. To continue I loaded everything into Photoshop and continued with the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Painted in the +1EV into the water, to remove the blend of the moving lights
3. Merged copy, where I filled in few areas around the corners, that were empty form the panorama blend
4. Darkened the bright lights from the -1EV exposure.
5. Brightened part of the reflection, to make it more visible
6. Retouched out all the people on the bridge
7. Corrected a stray light on the bridge
8. Few more bright spots corrected from the -2EV
9. The tower in the back lost all the contrast in the blend, so I recovered it from the 0EV exposure
10. Color Efex tonal contrast, with settings 10, 15, 10 and 10. These are my most used settings for this plugin
11+12. Curves and color balance, to correct the uneven brightness and color of the photo. I made the right part darker and more saturated.

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:

These are the Shoes on the Danube Bank, a World War II memorial in Budapest, to honor the Jews that were killed there, who were ordered to take off their shoes, and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river. It represents their shoes left behind on the bank.

I wanted to take a photo like this already few years ago, but I could never find them. But I think (but I’m not sure about that) that they were removed for the reconstruction of the parliament area, and were recently returned to their place. These are two shots blended in Photoshop.

Technique: Blend, Number of exposures: 2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 70mm, Aperture: 2.8, Middle exposure time: 0.4s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 47.50380, 19.04487

As you can see from the photos, the weather last week was a little boring (and hot as hell). So no clouds, no nice sunset, nothing like that. But at least the locations were nice :)

This is a three tile panorama, each tile from 2 exposures, tone-mapped in Oloneo Photoengine.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3×2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 32mm, Aperture: 13, Middle exposure time: 1/5s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.37179, 15.41444