My eBook on taking photos of fireworks has been available for a while to all my newsletter subscribers. But from today, any of you can download it directly without having to sign up.

So just click on this link Download Capture fireworks eBook to download it :)

And also feel free to share the book further, on you page, blog, whatever :). It would be nice if you do so, to link back to my blog, but I leave that up to you.

And we got to another post in my processing series. For today I have chosen a photo taken at night from the Burj Khalifa. So let’s take a look at it.

To get this final photo

I started with 4 exposures in Lightroom. I could have taken the usual 5, but as you can see, I had no need for it.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure.

In Lightroom I corrected the horizon line, white balance, chromatic abberations, noise and tweaked a little the shadows and vibrance.

Then I exported all the exposures as 16-bit Tiff files and opened them in Oloneo Photoengine. Changing the strength and contrast, I got this result.

As you can see, it lacks a little contrast, there are reflections visible (the photo was taken through a glass wall) and some areas are still too bright. I loaded the Oloneo result and the original exposures into Photoshop, and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. Oloneo result
2+3. 0EV exposure, darkened by one stop with a painted mask, to remove all the ghosting from teh HDR merge
4. -1EV exposure with a painted mask, to darken the bottom center area
5. few spots darkened from the -2EV exposure
6. merged layers on which I removed the reflection visible in the sky
7. Color Efex Pro contrast to get more local contrast in the photo
8. added more overall contrast
9. added more detail, by using the high pass filter
10+11. there were few bright areas after the pro contrast filter, so I corrected those from the -1EV and -2EV exposure
12. added a little more overall contrast
13. removed the glow in the top right corner, I just didn’t like it there

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:

For today I prepared another addition to my processing post series. Today we will take a look at a photo I took in the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. It really is a grand majestic place, just the white wall create a little challenge when editing. But lets take a look at it.

The final photo I created looked like this:

I started with 5 exposures, which I loaded into Lightroom. Here you can see the 0EV exposure:

As you can see, the white balance was totally off. I set it for a shot I took before this one, and forgot to change it (that’s why one should always shoot in RAW :)). So in Lightroom I corrected the white balance, removed the chromatic abberation, cropped the image and corrected the lens distortion.

I then exported all the files as 16-bit Tiff files and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. After tweaking the strength and contrast, I got quite an even result.

I then loaded all the original exposures and the Photoengine result into Photoshop layers and continued from there. The Photoengine result looked quite ok, but it was not what I wanted. A very classic problem with HDR was visible here, all the white walls just looked grey. My goal in editing was to make them white and shining like the real building. As the walls in the mosque are quite reflective, I wanted to show all the light reflection from them. So in the Photoshop, I did the following (layers numbered from bottom up) :

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +1EV exposure, set to Lighten blending mode. This mode makes this layer replace all the bottom layer pixels, which are darker
3. +2EV exposure, set to Lighten blending mode but only at 40% opacity. I also removed the brightest parts with a layer mask. With this I got the wall looking very bright (exactly as I wanted :))
4. a copy of the HDR Photoengine result, set to soft light. I brushed in only parts, to restore the texture in the floor
5. merged layer, with a strong noise reduction applied to it. Layer mask used to have the effect only on the sky.
6. merged layer, in which I retouched out all the people in the background
7. one more merge where I corrected few areas where the lights were bleeding into the blue sky
8. added linear contrast to the whole photo
9. added saturation to the yellow channel, to make the gold ornaments more prominent
10. color balance to make the whole photo warmer

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:

Today I haven’t been working on new photos for the blog, but instead I looked at adding more content to it. So you will find two new pages today.

First is an addition to my Top Spots category. I added a new city there, this time it’s Dubai. Go and check the list here.

Secondly, I added a new guide to the Guides section. It’s called How to save photos for web, and that’s exactly what’s it about. You can find the guide here.

A very important step in every photo editing, is the final step, saving for web. Here I will show you how I do it currently for all my photos (all the ones on this blog). So let’s get started.

First, lets take a photo. This one is already finished and I need to save it for web.

This photo has not yet been sharpened. If you want to get the best result, you have to first re-size your photo, to the final size, before you start with sharpening. So let’s re-size it first.

Go to Image/Image size and change the height to 900px (that’s the size I normally use, is different for everyone else). The width is calculated automatically here, as the constraint proportions is checked. As we want to create a web result, the document size has no importance for us.

Once re-sized, let’s continue with the sharpening. There are many ways one can do it, but one of the simplest is to just use Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp mask. Going with a smaller radius (0.1) and higher strength (100+) usually works the best here. On some photo one needs to go with smaller strength, to avoid the “over-sharpen” look.

A easy way to skip these steps is to use the Web Sharpening actions from TK Actions. You can find more about them here.

Lastly one needs to save the photo. But instead of using File/Save as, we need to go to File/Save for web. We need to use this, because we need to convert and include the color profile with the photo. We need to convert it to the sRGB, so it’s properly shown in web browsers and also include the color profile, so every program displaying them, does it in the same way. The preview should be set to Internet sRGB, so you see the final result as it’s shown in a browser.

Other than that, you can use any quality setting you want. And that’s it. Just choose a name you want and save it :)