Snow covered

I posted a similar photo last week, but I liked them both so here is another one. As snow is not that common in Bratislava, in the last few years, I had to take as many photos as I could of it. I don’t think there will be much more this year. And snow covered rocks at the Danube make for such a nice foreground subject.

As I mentioned, this is a blend of three exposures. It’s a vertorama where the top part is a blend of two exposures, and the bottom part is a single exposure. I combined them manually in Photoshop. It’s pretty simple, as the middle is a river, so you just blend them using a layer mask and a bit of painting with the brush. You can’t use any panorama software if you want to do a focal blend, as they will not align the photos that way.

Using SyncToy to locally backup photos

So how do one use it? First, decide on a folder you want to backup. Then, decide where you want to back it up too. So either a file-server, external drive or a second drive in your PC. In my case it’s a file-server, that is attached as a mapped network drive in my PC.

Continue by creating a folder pair with Create folder pair button. You can see in the screenshots, I have multiple, split based on whats in the folder.

Choose the folders, choose the type of synchronization, add a name to the pair and confirm. Since it’s a backup, use Echo as synchronization method. This will mirror you computer folder onto the backup folder, but not the other way around. So if you delete a file from your computer, and sync, it will be deleted also from the backup. Of course if you delete it accidentally, don’t sync, and just copy the file from the backup :)

Once the folder pair is done, you can just click on Run to sync them. But I prefer to first hit on Preview, that will list all the changes it will perform first. Like this I can quickly see what it will do. Once that is shown, I hit Run to finish the Sync.

Now just run this each time you want to run a backup and you are done.

Panorama at the Danube

This is another panorama I took last Monday down at the Danube river. The Danube was actually quite calm. This made the reflections nice an visible. I used steps that are at the shore there, to get completely down to the water and took a photo from there. There were few more spots I wanted to go to, I just could not find the steps there. There are multiple there, but under the snow, it was a bit dangerous to get down to the water, and I did not want to risk it. It happened to me once already that my foot slipped in between the rocks there, and that was without the snow. Better safe then sorry. One has to be always careful.

This is a three shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, edited in Photoshop.

And here are few details:

Finding photo problems using Curves in Photoshop

The technique is very easy. In Photoshop, create a new curves layer, and create an extreme contrast using the curve. Just click on it in the left are, and pull it to the top, and then on the right area create a second point and pull it down. It should look something like in this Photoshop screenshot.

It does not have to be exact, just have something that looks similar. What this did is to brighten the shadows, darken the highlights and added a lot of contrast in the mid-tones. The photo will look crazy colorful and psychedelic now.

But when you look at it, you can see that immediately problems stand out. Things that very barely visible are standing out really brightly right now.

Here are a few examples of it. Fist, a spot when two parts of a panorama were connected. You can see on the left, that it looks fine, but once you apply this filter, the bad transition shows up.

Secondly, here is an example of dust spots, using this filter makes them stand out much more. Will not work everywhere, but most of the time it will help a lot.

Also, lens flares will be much more visible. You can see one in the previous photo, and here is one more example of it. While in the regular photo, the flare is barely visible, after the filter you can see it exactly.

Let’s look at one more example. This is a sky that is not evenly lit due to being merged from multiple photos. If you try to fix it, it’s not that easy, as the differences are minimal. But once you apply the curves layer, the problem is visible immediately.

The simplest way to work with it is to have the curves layer on top, and then edit a layer under it. Then when you are done just turn off or delete the curves layer and you are done.

A little bonus for you. When you have uneven color transitions, mostly in skies or after you removed some object using content aware, it’s easy to fix them. Use strong blur on the area and then add noise to the area. Blur will create a nice transition, while the noise will prevent it from creating color banding. Best to do this on a separate layer and then paint it in with the layer mask.

The whole length of the Charles Bridge

I took this panorama quite a while ago. But as with many other photos I never edited it until now. My photo library is huge and I like to randomly look through it and select older photos to edit. Of course this I do mostly when I don’t have that many new photos to edit. Also, since ones editing skills tend to improve over time, I think I can now edit photo I would not dare to do few years ago.

So this photo is a 2 tile panorama, each tile from 6 exposures. I did so many exposures, as some of the lights around the Prague castle are really bright. In the end I used every single on in the final editing. I combined the shots together in PTgui and then blended them in Photoshop.

And here are few details:

And as I mentioned, here is a composite image based on this Prague panorama. I did extent the top and bottom parts a lot, and then blended in 4 different fireworks photos. It does create quite a different photo, doesn’t it?