Those of you who follow me on my personal FB profile, already seen a ton of new photos from the Bratislava Sensual dance festival, and I continue to be crazy busy. So today, again nothing new here, but I’m reposting one of my older videos, who some of you may have not seen yet :)

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m crazy busy today, and so have absolutely no time. So for today, I’m only reposting this short video I did on one way to use luminosity masks.

You can also download the PSD of the final file that you can see in the video from Dropbox here.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and don’t forget to switch the video to 720p :)

For more videos from me, check out my Video tutorial series Master exposure blending here:

Today I finally did a planed upgrade to may PC, on which I edit all my photos. This time, it was time to upgrade the monitor. For the last 7 years I used the Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW, a 24 inch full HD monitor. It was, and still is one of the best monitors I ever seen. And for how much I used it, it still works great. But after such a long time, it was time to replace it with something new :)

21:9

I always liked widescreen monitors. Even when I bought the first one, most people at that time only bought 4:3, and very few wide-screen ones. So when looking for a new monitor, I was immediately drawn to this ultrawide aspect ratio. But since first monitors that had it were just 29, I felt that that was just too small of a step up from a 24. So I waited, and now, the 34 inch versions are available, so I got one.

Here you can see my workspace with my old 24 inch, vs. the new 34 inch.

Old setup

New setup

LG 34um95

So the monitor I just got is the LG 34um95. It’s a 34 inch 21:9 screen, with a resolution of 3440×1440. In this post I will show you how it looks and what it does, and in a second post, probably next week, I will do a bigger review, especially how it is to edit on such a screen.

The screen have a very Apple style look, with shiny parts and silver background. Not really my favorite, but as I don’t see it from the back I don’t really mind. The screen comes with a nice looking, partially transparent stand, just too bad they chosen style over substance. The stand can’t be height adjusted more than 2cm (by selecting one from two sets of mounting holes) and it allows the screen to shake a little when you touch the table a little stronger. It also allows for a small tilt, but no rotation. The stand is also mostly metal, so has a nice quality feel.

The screen is mostly covered with plastic, with a metal rim around it. Here I actually seen few production errors, with the gap between the rim and the screen not being the same in all the places.

Box it came in

Stand connection and ports

The LG 34um95 allows for a lot of connections, from HDMI, through DisplayPort to Thunderbolt. It also has speakers, which I think nobody will ever use, as compared to the screen they are not so great. Additionally, it includes a USB hub, with a single USB 3 port and two USB 2 ports.

I only had few hours with the screen, so these are my first impressions. First of all, it’s huge. It’s very immersive and something completely different to a 16:9 screen. It’s very bright and colourful. It’s not only factory calibrated, but there is also a software directly from LG, that work with most calibration devices, so you can easily tune up it even more. The resolution allows for a lot of content to be seen at once, and especial panoramic photos, or new movies looks perfect.

The only issue I found that was not that great, was the backlight bleeding in the bottom corners and a little also in the top ones. It’s quite visible when the screen is completely black, and a little when it’s partially black. Not yet sure how I feel about it, as quite often it’s not visible. Will continue to use it and see.

Both monitors at same time

Calibrating

That’s all for now, more in the full review next week :)

For this Monday, I selected a little easier edit I did on one of the photos I took at the Schwarzsee under Matterhorn. It’s a state holiday in Slovakia today, so why not something easier. So let’s get started.

First, lest’s look at the finished and the original photo.

Finished photo

Original exposure

It looked not so bad to start with, but I still wanted to recover more from the sky and the reflection in the water. So I took 5 exposures and in Lightroom I corrected the horizon line, and lens problems.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

From there I continued into Oloneo Photoengine. There I only changed the strength and added contrast. As I mentioned before, I very rarely change anything else here. It’s just not needed. After that I only took the Photoengine result into Photoshop to edit further (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3. Added glow to the photo, as I wanted the bright areas to shine a little more (check out my glow tutorial here)
4. Color efex pro contrast to add more local contrast to the photo and more detail
5. Curves to add a little more contrast to the photo
6. I ended up loading the 0EV here, to recover few areas, where the process created too saturated colors, mostly in the foreground.

Combined 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:

Few days ago, I ordered a new 34 inch 21:9 monitor (which I’m still waiting for :)), as a nice upgrade to my 24 inch I’m working on right now. I will post more about it, once I have it, as I think it will change the way I work with Photoshop and Lightroom quite a lot. But until then, how about few wallpapers, already sized for a monitor that big.

So if you already have a 21:9 screen, you may like one of these wallpapers :) Of course you can find more on the wallpapers page.

The all new ones are in a 3440×1440 resolution, so big enough for a 34 inch screen, or anything smaller than that.