There was no process post last week, but there will be one today. And I will show you how I edited this long exposure shot of the SNP bridge in Bratislava. I took this photo using a 10 stop ND lens, so that changed the look quite a bit. But I still have to tweak a lot of things, so let’s look at exactly what I did.

Finished photo

Original photo

I started in Lightroom with 5 exposures. I could have done the same with less, as most of the image is quite uniform, but I tend to take more just to be sure I have enough. In Lightroom I corrected the lens distortion, chromatic abberations, and tweaked the white balance, to get a much warmer feel to the photo. From there I exported everything into Photoengine.

Used exposures

Lightroom tweaks

I didn’t did much in Photoengine. All I needed is to adjust the strength and the contrast to get to where I wanted to be with this photo. Then I just loaded it into Photoshop and continued from there (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Olonoe Photoengine result
2. I removed dust spots and the visible part of a ship from the photo
3. Removed the cables visible in the bottom part of the image (normally I would move the camera to avoid them, but it was not possible here)
4. Removed few visible people on the bridge.
5. Brightened the inside part of the bridge a little from the +2EV exposure
6+7. Corrected a waving flag from the -2EV exposure, which I brightened using curves
8. Color Efex Briliance/Warmith to add more color to the sunset
9. Color Efex Pro contrast to add more local contrast to most of the photo
10. Removed a little noise from the sky
11. Brightened the windows on the building, to have it look more shiny
12. Added more overall contrast
13. Added more saturation on the blues, for the sky and the water reflection

If you seen my other process posts, you will notice that I almost always end with adding more contrast. The reason is, that sharpening a photo will remove a little contrast, and I prepare the photo for that.

Merged in Photoengine

Photoshop edit

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:

I just arrived at home from my trip to Holland, and while I took few photos, I just have no energy to edit anything today. So here is one of my all time favorite photos, and there will be something new tomorrow :)

As I post photos, from time to time I get questions, asking if this or that thing in them is real. Better said, if I got something because it was really there, or by camera settings or just in Photoshop. And to clarify my point of view on this, here is this post.

I think, every photographer has a line, to what edits he/she is willing to perform on a photo, while still calling it a photo. Anything after this, I would already call a photo-manipulation. This line is quite different for everyone, and also quite different based on what are the photos used for.

I edit my photos quite a lot, as it’s quite obvious from this site. But I try to stay away from photo manipulations, or if I do some, I clearly mark it it the description, that a part of the photo is not real.

So what I will edit in a photo:

1. I will remove camera issues, distortion, aberrations, noise, flares and similar
2. I will remove myself from the photo, stuff like random shadows, or forgot to move my bag and similar
3. I will remove people, cars, scaffolding, cranes and trash. All this I find very distracting and already try to avoid them when composing a photo. But as everyone knows, sometimes cropping them out will make the photo worse
4. I will play with brightness, color and sharpness of a photo. This are actually all the things you change in HDR post-processing
5. sometimes I also remove identifiable markers, like license plates on cars, or copyrighted signs

And then there are things I don’t do, or if I do them I clearly state that they have been done:

1. fake reflection. If I remember correctly, in the last 5 years, I posted 4 photos with a fake reflection. Still, they all probably had fake in their name :)
2. fake light effects, flares, light stars and similar
3. paste in a star sky. If I can’t get a photo of the stars from a certain spot, I won’t create one.
4. paste in sun, moon, rainbow, people, objects or anything else
5. combining photos from different locations into one

Then there is also a question about the sky in landscape photos. I don’t mind when someone replaces a sky in their photo, I just don’t do it. I know how to do it, I done it few times, but never posted the result. The reason is that the photo just looks so fake to me afterwards, that I can’t get over it. I just know that it’s not what I have seen.

That’s actually also how I limit my edits. If a photo starts to feel fake to me, I know I have to undo and tone down the edits I did on it.

Btw. I’m not saying I don’t like photo manipulations. I like them, and there are many photographers who create wonders with them. I just like to know, when I’m looking at a photo, if its a photo or a photo manipulation. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell :)

What are you thought? Where is your line?

If you looked at my photos, you would notice that I use Photoengine quite a lot. Over the last few years, it became one of the main tools that I use. And each time I post a process post, I also mention that I used Photoengine to blend the photos and I only tweaked few settings. To make this a little more elaborate, today I will go more into this, and show you my exact process of how I work with Photoengine.

Always before I get into Photoengine, I correct few things in Lightroom. Lens distortions and chromatic aberrations are the ones I correct the most, but from time to time I also correct the white balance. One can of course do this also in Photoengine, but doing that will make it harder to blend in parts of the original exposures back into the photo.

Thats why I always use 16-bit tiff files as Photoengine input, as I want all these tweaks already be included. Then I select what files to use. If a series is exposed properly in the middle, the Photoengine result will nicely exposed from the start. But if you include some very bright, or very dark exposures, the base will be either too bright or too dark, and you then have to spend longer time tweaking the settings to get a good result. Much easier to just leave those exposures out, and correct possible over or underexposed areas later.

If there was wind while I took the exposures, I turn on Auto Align. I don’t use the ghost removal as it can result in strange artifacts around the photo, and it makes it just harder to correct later, as it just not even enough.

Once in the HDR tonemaping, I start with changing the strength, usually to something around 40-60. Almost never more. You will see, that when you move the slider, first the shadows will get brighter, and after a certain point, the bright areas will become darker. I would stay lower from this point, and just leave the bright areas as they are. Making them darker, will just make the photo more unrealistic, and creates ugly borders around the dark areas.

You will notice that this will also remove all of the contrast from the photo. So the second thing I change, is the first contrast slider. It’s hard to say exactly how much, but if I see that I’m gong very high, and still don’t have enough contrast, I add a little Low dynamic tone contrast. That one usually adds more contrast more quickly.

Sometimes this will make the photo look a little dark, and that can be easily corrected with fine exposure. The last step I do is to check what effect the Natural HDR mode has, if I like the colors more with it on or off. Sometimes I even save both versions, and then blend them together in Photoshop. This is when I like some areas from one with it on, and some areas from one with it off.

And that’s all. From here I save the file as a 16-bit tiff, and continue in Photoshop. Feel free to ask any questions about this in the comments.

Today, I will show you how I edited this blue hour shot taken over Bratislava. So let’s take a look.

As you can see, the base exposure was quite alright, with only some areas overexposes, and some a little dark. It missed detail, contrast and a little color.

Finished photo

Original photo

For this shot I took 7 exposures. In the end, when checking out the exposure, I did not use the brightest one, as I seen no need, and the second brightest already had a quite nicely exposed shadows. I started in Lightroom, where I corrected the horizon, removed chromatic aberrations and lens distortions. Thenk I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. I actually could have done this differently, but I like how Oloneo Photoengine adds structure and local contrast.

All exposures

Combining in Photoengine

After tweaking strength and contrast in Photoengine, I loaded everything into Photoshop and continued from there (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3+4. I used the darkest exposures to correct the strong highlights on the buildings on the right.
5. There were few lights that were not on in all exposures, and that created ugly black spots in blending, so I had to correct that from one of the brighter exposures.
6. Color efex Detail extractor used on the bottom left, to get more detail in the trees, and a little more variation.
7. Curves to get more contrast into the shot, but not in the bottom left
8. Color efex Briliance/Warmith to get a little more color into the clouds.

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: