Today, I will show you how I edited this sunset shot taken under the SNP bridge in Bratislava. If you are also curious about the exif data, you can find it in the original post here..

So let’s get started. If you look at the original photos, you see quite a few problems. First, the biggest is the wrong white balance, then overexposed sky, the bridge is too dark, and there are quite a few dust spots and objects that need to be removed.

I started as always in Lightrom with these 5 exposures. I corrected white balance, removed chromatic aberrations and corrected the perspective a little bit. From there I exported all the files as 16-bit tiffs, and loaded them into Oloneo PhotoEngine. There I adjusted strength, contrast and tweaked white balance a little more.

With that done, I continued in Photoshop. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. Photoengine result.
2. -2EV exposure, to darken the sky a little under the bridge
3. 0EV exposure, to recover the cloud there a little, as I did not like the result from HDR tonemapping
4. Removed all the trash from the grass and the rocks
5. Removed the blurry people from the top of the bridge :)
6. Color Efex pro Polarization filter, to get more color into the sky, and the sunset. I toned it down on the highlights, as it was too strong there.
7. -2EV exposure again, as the previous edit brightened the sky too much
8. added contrast to the sky and the water
9+10. at first I thought they would not bother me, but after a while they did. So on these two layers I removed the cable in the bottom of the photo and the single ray of light going through the bridge.
11. More overall contrast
12. Toned down the warmth of the photo a little, as it was a bit too red for me
13. Brightened the shadows, while also adding contrast to them (aren’t curves great? :)).

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:

Let’s have a look today on one of my recent photos and how it was edited. This time I chosen this very early morning shot from the Bir-Hakeim bridge in Paris. So lets start :)

When you compare the final and the starting shot, the biggest thing I needed to correct was how crooked the photo was, the color, and tone down on the sky, and brighten the shadow places.

I started with Lightroom, where I removed the chromatic aberrations, toned down the highlights, and corrected the crooked horizon. I also needed to correct the perspective distortion a bit. From there I exported all the files and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. Not much work there, as just by changing the TM strength, I got almost all I needed. I also moved the hue a bit toward purple, as the picture was a little too green.

From here I loaded the Photoengine result and the original 0Ev exposure into Photoshop. The 0EV was a second export from lightroom, where I opened the shadows, toned down the highlights and tweaked the hue, so it blends more nicely with the HDR.

In Photoshop I did the following steps (numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. The 0EV exposure, to get rid of the moving car that passed while I took this photo
3. Merged layer, on which I removed the dust spots, and the crane on the right side
4. Color Efex Pro Contrast, to get a bit more local contrast into the photo
5. Color Efex Polarization to darken the sky
6. A bit of correction to the left side, as there was another crane visible :)
7. Noise reduction using Imagenomic noiseware, but I removed it from the trees, and it destroyed all the detail.
8. Another merged layer, on which I removed all the white outlines. Here I’m including a before/after shots, to see what I mean. This outlines are a result of the HDR process, where two areas with very different brightness come together. If you want to see exactly how I got rid of them, check out the tutorial I made about this. Btw. you can still see them a little in the final photo, but that’s due to the sharpening process. If I printed the full resolution file, there would be none :)

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:

Really a long time passed since I posted a process post. But today, I will show you how I edited one of my recent photos from Paris, and of course also how it looked straight out of the camera. So let’s take a look.

If you looks at the start and the result, you can see where the problems were. The original photo is boring, does not include this yellow glow one wants when shooting into the sun, it’s too dark/bright in some areas, and there are lens flares. That all needed to be corrected.

 
For this I used three photos. I took more, but I had no need for the rest. The third photo, with my hand in it, is so I’m able to remove lens flares, and you can find all the info on that in the How to remove lens flares tutorial.

My first edits were in Lightroom. The biggest one was the change in white balance, to get this golden glow into the photo. I also removed chromatic aberrations here.

 
This done I exported all the files as 16-bit tiff files and loaded them into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. The brighter of the two exposures
2. Exposure with my hand in front of the sun. I used a brush to just pain in the bottom part of this photo, that I wanted to use.
3. Color balance. The photo was not golden enough, so I shifted the color until I had the result I wanted (in this case, I had to push all the midtones to around -25).
4. The darkest exposure, from which I painted in the sky.
5. I felt that the sky was still not dark enough, so I returned to Lightroom, underexposed the darkest exposure, exported again, and did the same as I did with the layer underneath.
6. Added linear contrast to the photo
7. Brightened the midtones of the photo with a curve.
8. I still wanted more color, so I used Color Efex Briliance & Warminth, to boost the yellows in the shot. Then I removed it from few areas, as I though it was too strong there.
9. The tower was fading a little into the sky, so I added more contrast to it, to make it more dominant.
10. It still needed a bit of color
11. I ended up with a little of Color Efex Pro contrast, to mostly get more definition in the foreground.

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:

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:

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: