A little later than planed, but here are the winners of the 4th round of my contest, this time sponsored by Oloneo.

But first few stat. This time 179 people entered the contest, with everyone submitting their own version. The voting album recieved 29 200 clicks and over 2800 likes were given to the entries.

And for those who didn’t win, you can find all the information on Oloneo and their products here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/home.html
and you can find a trial version you can try right away here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/download_form.html?product_id=pe1&type=trial
(there is no Mac version available, but you can run it in a virtual machine)

Also big thanks to the judgest Elia Locardi from BlameTheMonkey, Beboy from BeboyPhotography and Dave Morrow from DaveMorrowPhotography

Judges selection

The photo selected for the first spot by the judges was the one by Jerome Obille, who receives a copy of the Oloneo Photoengine software.

In the second place was the photo by David Bouscarle, who receives a copy of my video tutorial series Master exposure Blending

I would like to also mention Alin Grigore and Valentin Nesta who were not far behind.

Voting winners

The person with the most likes on his photo, winning a copy of the Oloneo PhotoEngine software is Vineet Suthan

In the second place, with the second most number of likes is Raymond Viloria, who recieves a copy of my video tutorial series Master Exposure Blending.

Thank you everyone who joined, and I hope you all enjoyed the contest. And I also hope there will be another one soon :) :)

Let’s look at another photo, and how I edited it. Again I chosen one from Dubai, so here goes.

This photo was taken in the Dubai Marina, very late at night (sometime around 1am).

I did only 4 exposures here, as the +1ev was bright enough. It usually is when one take photos of a strongly lit up city. As always I loaded all the brackets into Lightroom, where I corrected the lens distortion and white balance.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure:

After that I exported all as 16-bit tiff files, and loaded into Oloneo Photoengine. Only tweaked the strength and contrast. The result from it looked like this. (you can see there is a small part of the corner missing, this is due to the lens correction, I didn’t crop it, as I could easily fill it in Photoshop)

Continuing I loaded all the files into Photoshop, starting with the Oloneo Photoengine result. There I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up)

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Blended in the foreground from the +1ev exposure
3. Blended in the highlights from the -2ev exposure
4. Merged exposure and corrected the corner and cleaned the dust spots
5. Removed the broken piece of railing that was in the shot. I didn’t notice it while shooting (it was dark) and it was too distracting there
6. Cleaned out the retouch a little more
7. Added contrast to the dark areas of the photo
8. Corrected few lights on the Cayan tower (the spiral one, they are moving, which created ghosting)
9. Color efex Skylight filter, to add more color to the photo
10. Added more contrast to few buildings
11. Removed a little bit of a glow above some of the buildings
12. Removed the glow completely. It was on few buildings in the center, which looked strange.

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:

And the submission time for the Photo editing contest sponsored by OLONEO has ended. In total, 179 people joined and submitted a version of the photo provided. And now it’s time to vote. So head over to the Facebook gallery and like the one (or more) that you think are the best.

The voting ends next Sunday the 25th at Midnight CET, with the winners announced on Monday. For complete rules, please visit the contest announcement post.

Good luck everyone and a lot of votes :)

Same as probably many photographers, I get a lot of questions about my photos. And a lot of times it’s all about: What ISO did you use? What aperture? What exposure time? .. and so on. But does knowing this really help you?

I remember, that when I started taking photos, I also looked at EXIF data quite often. That’s why I actually also started adding them to every of my blog posts (not that I really see a need for it anymore :)). It was sometimes interesting to see what other people use, but I don’t remember it being so useful. And once one gets to the point that one understands what everything effects, what change of aperture does, what ISO does, and all the other, all this data looses any importance it once had. Of course as with everything, there are few exceptions, but we will take a look at those.

So lets take a look at the usual EXIF info you get, and some HDR specific stuff that I mention by my photos. Of course all the parameters are connected to each other, so one effect all the others. I will go through them separately, but will mention the connection from time to time. In few cases I simplify things, to keep this post to a manageable length.

Number of brackets used

This one is really HDR specific (not really EXIF, but I include it anyway). One gets this question all the time, and the best answer is always, how many are needed. The number of brackets needed varies very greatly by a camera and the situation. After years of shooting with my camera, I came to the conclusion, that 5 exposures is enough for me 95% of the time. The only time that I take more, is when I shoot directly into the sun or a different strong light source. But even in that situation, there is a huge chance, I will not use all of them.

If one takes RAW files into account and the dynamic range they contain, I could even get most of my photos only with 3, sometimes even only 2 exposures. I just take more to be safe.

So does knowing how many exposures someone used for a particular photo help you to get a better HDR? Simply, no.

Aperture used

Knowing the Aperture can, but does not have to be useful. Aperture effect your DOF (depth of field), sharpness and light stars. Of course all of this is also affected by other parameters (lens, sensor size, focal length..) but Aperture is the main part here.

So what can you learn? Almost nothing about the DOF. As you usually don’t know the distance between the camera and the subject, the aperture on its own wont help you. With the basic rules of bigger aperture -> smaller DOF & closer to the subject -> smaller DOF covering almost all the situations, this is all you need to know.

Sharpness is very depending on the lens, and what post-processing was done. So if you see a RAW file at 100% you can judge if a certain aperture is better on that lens. Each lens has a sweet spot, and Aperture where it’s sharpest, so this can help you sometime. Still, looking at a edited photo and trying to determine this is pointless. Btw. if you leave something out of focus in your photo, make everything else look much more sharper :)

The last light stars, the effect when a light source creates a star in your photo, is very depended on the Aperture. But it’s also very dependent on the light source and the distance to that source. Again the simple rule smaller aperture -> more visible light stars is enough for one to know.

So does knowing what aperture was used help you? Usually not.

Exposure time

This is one that can be interesting. Especially in very short and very long exposure photography. Think about it this way, the difference between a 1s photo and a 2s photo is usually negligible. But the difference between 1s a 100s photo is already quite different. There are also few kinds of photography where you have to be very careful about the exposure time. For instance star photography. You have to limit the exposure time to avoid star trails (of course taking into account aperture and focal length). Also times you need to get nice light streaks from cars, or completely blurred people could be interesting. On the other side, the very short exposure are interesting when you goal is a complete freeze of motion in a subject. A good example is flowing water or waterfalls, or maybe fireworks.

So does knowing the exposure time can be useful to you? Sometime.

ISO used

As one usually changes the ISO only when it’s really needed, especially when a shorter exposure is needed, knowing what ISO was used is almost always really useless. The only time that I can think of that this would be an interesting thing, is when you want to buy a new camera and want to know the performance. But even in these case, if you don’t see the RAW file at 100%, you can’t get a good image of the performance.

So does knowing the ISO help you? I don’t think so.

Focal length

In my opinion this is the most interesting attribute you can find in a EXIF. The look of the photo, especially the perspective compression is very dependent. I you are searching for photo locations, knowing what focal length is being used can help you a lot with your preparations. Of course small differences are not important, but knowing if its wide-angle shot or zoomed in can give one a lot of help. With practice one can guess the focal length from the photo, but having a number there is easier.

So does knowing the focal length help you? I think it can.

So can one learn?

Not really. It can be interesting sometime, but not really that helpful. Much better approach is to learn what these parameters change in a photo and experiment with them. Just leaving the Auto and the P modes behind and switching to Av or M will help you more with understanding the photos than looking at all the EXIF on this blog :)

Since there is currently a contest running, where you can win a copy of Oloneo Photoengine (more here), I though in this process post I show a photo where I used Oloneo Photoengine. This is one of the photos I took in Dubai, from the top of the Burj Khalifa.

So we look at how I got this result:

I took 4 exposures, from -2EV to +1EV (usually one does not need the +2EV, and it just takes too long, so I sometimes skip it). I loaded them all into Lightroom, where I corrected the white balance, applied lens corrections and chromatic abberation removal, and corrected the horizon line. Then I export all in full size as 16-bit tiff files. I usually don’t compress them at all, as I will delete them when I don’t need them anymore, and I use the ProPhoto RGB for color space.

Here you can see the original 0EV exposure:

From there I loaded all these brackets into Oloneo Photoengine. I actually changed only two things. The strength and the HDR contrast. That actually all I change most of the time there :)

And here you can see the Oloneo Photoengine result (also saved as a 16-bit tiff)

From there I loaded everything into Photoshop. The Photoengine result and also all the original brackets. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. the Photoengine result
2+3+4+5. the original exposures. What I did was select the light parts and blend in the moving cars into the HDR, so I remove ghosting. In few ares I also hand painted small parts that I found too strange in the HDR
6+7. added glow to the photo (check out the glow tutorial here)
8. high pass sharpening
9. added more contrast to the whole photo using curves
10. changed the color balance for highlights (made them 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: