Let’s look at how one of my recent photos was edited. Today I will show you this night shot with star trails, I took few weeks ago in Vienna. So let’s start.

Finished photo

Original photo

For this photo I took over 200 exposures. First I took two hours worth of 30s shots for the stars. As the Sony a7R does not have an intervalometer in it, what I did was, I set the camera to continuous shooting and locked in the shutter button on the remote. It worked without any issues. For each of these photos, I corrected the lens distortion, chromatic aberations and white ballance in Lightroom.

Exposures for Star trails

Corrected in Lightroom

I also took 3 additional exposures, each with shorter times, for all the lights in the scene. I did the same corrections in Lightroom on them as for all the other photos.

Exposures for HDR

Corrected in Lightroom

I exported all as tiff files, and started with creating the star trails. As loading them all at once would probably kill my computer, I loaded them in 20 image stacks, where I only changed all to lighten blend mode and flattened them into one layer. While doing that, I also masked out few parts from the right, as there was the setting moon and it created a little glow.

From there I blended in the darker exposures to correct the few lights and removed the few people that were in the shot. To get the final look, I corrected out the fisheye distortion, added Color efex detail extractor and Pro contrast to make the stars more visible. I finished the edit with more saturation in the blue, and overall contrast.

Blended star trails

Finished photo

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:

Sorry, but no new photo today. I’m just quite busy with other work that I have to finish. So for now, how about a repost, one of the new tutorial videos I posted recently :)

Time to update the wallpaper page again, today with two new 21:9 wallpapers, both in 3440×1440 resolution :) I really like this aspect ratio, and I hope the monitors using it will catch on more, and more people will enjoy the stunning feeling of immersion using them.

Get them both from the wallpapers page.

I’ve been neglecting the process posts recently. The reason is simple, they take longer to put together, and I’ve been a little busier with other stuff. But let’s look at one of my recent photos, and how it was edited :)

This photo is from Arnhem in Netherlands, and is one of my very few photos taken with a fish eye lens.

Finished photo

Original photo

As you can see from the finished to original comparison, the 0EV exposure was quite dark. This was mostly due to very strong light of the bridge, and the camera of course compensated for that. Additionally, it was a little more distorted than I liked.

So as usually I started with all the exposures in Lightroom. Here I only partially removed the lens distortion and removed the chromatic aberations. From here I continued in Oloneo Photoengine.

All exposures

Tweaked in Lightroom

Right here you can see how different the image looked only with few tweak in Photoengine. I still needed to correct few things, so I loaded the result and all the original exposures into Photoshop. First I cropped the image, to get rid of most of the visible parts of the lens in the corners. Then I did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +2EV exposure, to brighten few areas around the horizon.
3. -2EV exposure, to darken the light on the bridge and the oversaturated green
4. merged copy, on which I retouched out the rest of the visible parts of the lens
5. brightened the ship from the +1EV
6. brightened the lights from the +2EV, to make them more visible
7. darkened the bridge pillar as it was too bright in the HDR, here I replaced it from the 0EV exposure
8. little bit of Color Efex Pro Contrast, to get more definition in the photo
9. little bit of Color Efex Tonal Contrast, to get more local contrast between objects in the photo
10. recovered few bright spot (result of Color Efex) from the -1EV exposure
11. once again repaired the bright light on the pillar from the -2EV

Merged in Oloneo

Finished in Photoshop

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:

A little continuation of yesterdays post :) This is (almost) all the stuff I shown you yesterday, put together into a usable form. From the Gitzo tripod, through the Sunwayfoto XB-44 ball head, to the universal L bracket.

I’m actually quite pleased how the L bracket fits to the Metabones adapter. It is of course not created specifically to it, but due to it’s versatility, to fit any camera, it fits also that quite nicely. It moves the camera even a little more to the back, but that in my opinion even helps the balance of the whole setup even more. The only problem I noticed, is, that I have to detach the remote when I wan to go into the vertical position. If it’s connected, I’m not able to close the clamp, due to the cable.

After the first day of use (I had some interior photoshoot today) I’m quite pleased with the purchase. Just will take some time to get use how differently everything is being tightened, compared to my old stuff. Still need much more experience to do a review for it :)