I’m currently preparing blog posts for the whole next week (as I will be traveling) and don’t have enough photos edited, there is another process post today. So another oportunity to lear something from my process :)

Today it’s a sunrise photo from Budapest. This was a two stage edit, as I also used Oloneo Photoengine. So to get to this result:

I took 7 photos, corrected white balance and leveled the horizon in Lightroom and then exported all as 16-bit Tiff files. Imported those to Oloneo Photoengine and combined them. I use only one slider there, TM Strength, and usually move it to aroudn 40-60. Like this I only push down the brightness difference between dark and light areas and give myself a good start for further edits. The result from Oloneo looked like this:

I then loaded it, with the original brackets into photoshop, and did the folowing edits (numbered from bottom up)
1. Oloneo result
2. 0EV exposure to correct the ship, as it was moving
3. +2EV to brighten few areas on the bridge
4. -2EV to darken most of the image (it was just too bright)
5. Color efex pro contrast preset used to get more detail from the image
6. Color efex detail extractor preset on a low setting, to get even more detail. It was mostly needed on the buildings
7+8. Glow effect (check out my glow tutorial)
9. color balance to make the sunrise more yellow
10. brightened the shadows to make the light more even
11. nothing, I just needed the merget layer for Color efex, and forgot to delete it :)
12. Color efex Darken/Lighten center, to darken the corners and lighten the center (so the image pulls your eyes more into the sunrise)
13. added contrast to basic midtones
14. added more exposure to the image, but not to the brightest parts. At this stage of the edit I was just tweaking the final look, making small changes.
15. added overall contrast
16. brightened the darkest parts again
17. desaturated the ship, so it’s white
18. removed a little bit of saturation from the whole image
19. added detail with the high pass filter
20. still was not satisfied with the brightenss in few parts, so corrected it with a levels channel

And thats all :)
Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

Another tuesday, another process post. For today I chosen a photo of the Scott monument in Edinburgh, Scotland. So to get to this photo, I took 5 photos.

I loaded all the RAW files into Lightroom, where I corrected the white balance first (you can see on the original photo that it has a strong purple cast).

After that I exported all files into Photoshop and did the following steps (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. 0EV exposure
2. -1EV exposure, used luminescence masks and darkened the statue in the middle and few other bright spots
3. -2EV exposure, used to darken the statue even more
4. +1EV exposure, brightened the overall photo
5. +2EV exposure, brightened the sky more and few other areas
6. content aware fill to create a small part of the missing sky, which was lost due to lens correction
7. corrected a light glow around the statue, this sometimes happens when there is a huge difference between dark and light areas
8. added details using the high pass filter
9+10. added glow, check out my Glow tutorial to see exactly how
11. Color effex pro contrast to pull out more detail from the photo
12. darkened the brightest areas a little

And that’s all.
Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

Today there is another process post for you. This time its a long exposure photo from Durnstein in Austria. I used the Hoya ND400 filter here, which made the water nice and smooth, giving so a beautiful reflection.

So to thet to this result

I dit the following (layer numbered from bottom up)
1. -1EV exposure to start with
2. -2EV exposure to darken few parts of the buildings
3. +1EV exposure to brighten most of the photo
4. +2EV exposure to get detail in the darkest areas
5. color balance just on the darkest exposure, as the shadow areas were to blue and I wanted them more yellow
6. color balance on the whole photo, added more yellow to correct for the ND filter color cast
7. first Color efex pro contrast filter to pull out more detail in the photo
8. added sharpness with the high pass filter
9. second Pro contrast filter, as there was still a little color cast
10. third Pro constras filter, as I wanted to pull out the darks even more (I would probably be able to get all this in one use of Pro contrast, but like this I can mas all them differently)
11. darkened the brightest lights
12. the water got too green, so this color balance corected this
13. added more saturation to yellows to get more color in the hills
14. a little bit of motion blur on the foreground water, to give it a more smoother feel
15. noise reduction, but not on the hills
16. more saturation to the blue color to get better looking sky
17+18. added glow, to see what exactly it does, check out this guide
19. a bit of brightenss to the darkest parts of the photo

Continue to the full post to see the -1EV exposure from which I started my edit

One of the steps I do almost in each photo post-processing is adding a little bit of glow to the photo. Glow softens the photo, adds contrast and saturation and overall makes the photo more pleasant to the eye.

There are multiple ways you can add glow to your photos (for instance Glamour glow preset in the Color effex pro plugin), but I personally prefer to do it just using Photoshop. It’s very simple and requires only two layers to apply. I went step by step in my description, but for those who are lazy to go through it, I also created a Photoshop action for you, which does all of this for you. You can download the action from here:

HDRshooter glow Photoshop Action

So lets take a look at this photo (I suggest clicking on the photos to see them bigger, to see the difference better):

The first one has no glow added, the second one has the glow on 25% and the third one on 50%. You can see the difference in contrast, softness and color here. You can also see that glow will darken the very dark areas and brighten the very bright areas, so this is something one has to take into account here.

How to add glow?

So how do you add this glow. Lets start with a photo in Photoshop:

Our fist step is to duplicate this photo (if you have a file with multiple layers, just merge them into one new layer). To duplicate, right click on the layer and select duplicate layer

Next select the new layer and blur it. Gaussian blur works very well here. I usually go for a 30px blur, but it greatly depends on the size of your image. For my 20Mpix images, 30px works well. If your images are smaller, you should use less blur, for bigger images you can use more.

Now we have to change the blending mode of this layer. While the layer is still selected change it to soft light

You can see the photo now completely changed, but it a little bit to dark, so we need to brighten the effect. I use for that a new adjustment layer. You can use anyone, but I prefer Curves, as I can add more contrast if needed. So choose new adjustment layer and curves

And then change the blending mode of this new layer to screen. This will brighten everything under it by one stop.

The result is now better, but the curves layer effects everything under it, and we need it to just effect the glow layer. To do this, right click onto it and choose Create clipping mask.

As a last step we need to change the opacity of the glow layer. The higher, the stronger the effect is

You can also add a layer mask to the glow layer, and only paint it onto the areas where you want it (or remove it from the areas where you don’t need it).

And that’s all. The photo now has a nicer contrast, nice glow and much richer colors. It can happen that the photo will be a little to dark after this, but that’s can be easily corrected.

Feel free to ask any questions and don’t forget to download the provided action :)

Today I have for you another processing post. They seem to be quite popular, so I will continue with them. I really hope they are helpfull to some of you or at least intereting :)

So for today I chosen one of my favorite photos, one from the Bojnice castle. The light difference here was very high, with the castle brightly lit and the stone wall in front of the camera haveing no light at all.

So to get to the image I took 10 brackets overall. First I a 5 exposure shot of the castle. I saw that the wall was still too dark on the +2EV exposure, so I changed the ISO from 100 to 1600 and did a second series just for the wall (I could have done it also without the ISO change, but it would take very long exposures to get any light there)

After that I exported all the images from Lightroom into photoshop, while only adding a little vibrance and some noise reduction.

Then I continuead as follows (numbered from bottom up)

1. 0EV exposure, from teh darker series
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and the castle
3. -2EV exposure to darkent the castle
4 to 7. -1EV to +2EV exposure from teh bright series to brighten the foreground and the wall
8. -1EV exposure from the dark series to correct few areas with a bad contrast
9. Color effex pro Tonal contrast to add more detail to few areas
10. Darkened the lights with a luminance mask
11. Color effex pro Pro contrast to add more local contrast to the photo
12+13. I retouched a little stand that was next to the castle, it really bothered me there :)
14. Added contrast to the basic midtones
15+16. Added more glow
16. Darkened the bright lights
17. Removed the greeen color cast from the bright lights
18. Desatureated the most saturated colors (mask created with TK Actions)
19. Darkened the very bright lights

Feel free to ask any questions about this

Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposures from both series of brackets.