For today’s process post, let’s look at one of my photos taken in Edinburgh, Scotland. I actually wanted to take a photo of this beautiful hotel in the middle of the city, but as I set up my camera, a buss stopped right in front of me. So I quickly recomposed, to make the bus the main subject of the photo.

It was actually quite funny, how the people in the bus noticed me taking the photo, and nicely smiled for it :)

So to get this final image

I started with 5 exposures, with the 0EV looking like this.

It looked quite OK from the start, but few tweaks were still necessary. I imported them all into Lightroom and corrected only the chromatic aberrations and lens distortion’s there.

As you can see, the 5th exposure was not usable at all, so I haven’t even loaded it into Photoshop. So after loading the other 4 exposures into Photoshop, I did the following (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. 0EV exposure
2. darkened the brightest parts from the -1EV shots (you can see the mask here, I used a luminance mask to create the selection and then brushed over it)

3. there were still few bright areas, so I repeated the process with the -2EV exposure
4. brightened few spots from the +1EV exposure
5. used the -1EV once more, as I wanted to use the people in the bus from that exposure. The mask is manually painted.
6. added more contrast to the darkest areas of the photo
7. added a little contrast to the midtones
8. brightened a little the shadow darks (all these masks were created using TK actions)
9. merged the layers into a new one, and retouched out few spots
10. desaturated the blue channel, as the sky was too blue
11. added more structure using the high pass sharpening method
12. added a little more overall contrast.

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:

Let’s look at another photo, and how I put it together. For today’s photo I used 56 different exposures, that were all combined in a different way. This was my first experiment with shooting star trails in the middle of the city, and I was quite happy with the result. So let’s go :)

For this result

I started with 48 exposures for the stars.

Each one looking like this (you can’t really see the stars, but that’s normal :))

I edited them all in Lightroom, to remove lens distortion, chromatic aberrations and vignetting. I then exported all into layers in photos. The exported images all looked like this one:

I can’t show you the Photoshop file for the stars, as I forgot to save it, but what I did was to change all except the first layer to the blend mode lighten. I also played with contrast and levels, to make the stars more visible. In the end I ended with this result.

With this the first part of the photo was finished, not for the bridge part. I took additional 8 images as a HDR series.

I applied the same corrections to them in Lightroom as with the star shots, to make the blend easier. I then exported them all as 16-bit Tiff files and loaded into Oloneo Photoengine. There I changed the strength and contrast to get this result:

From here I continued into Photoshop. I loaded the HDR and the stars images into layers, and blended them together by using a selection of the sky and manually painting few areas. I then also applied Color effex detail extractor onto the image, to get more detail on the bridge and make the stars even more visible. I ended by applying more contrast and making the stars more whiter by using levels.

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:

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:

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:

How about a process post today? Again I chosen a little more complicated photo, a vertorama. It’s only from two shots, but it nicely shows the whole process. So to get to this photo from Bardejovske Kupele, I did the following:

As always I started with loading all the files into Lightroom. There were 10 of them in total, but I could go with fewer of them anyway. I just took 5 different exposures to be sure I have enough.

I corrected lens distortion and white balance and exported all as 16-bit tiff files. Those I loaded into PTGui, to create the vertorama blends. (this is explained in detail in the HDR panoramas tutorial)

From where I ended with 5 vertoramas, which I then loaded in Oloneo Photoengine. There simply by changing the strength and contrast I got this result:

Continuing, I loaded all the vertoramas and also the Photoengine result into Photoshop, where I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3+4+5. This is the vertorama created from the 0EV expsurs, modified for color and exposure and then blended into the Oloneo result. I needed to replace the sky, as there was ghosting from the moving clouds.
6. -2EV to darken few small parts
7. +2EV to brighten few ares
8. desaturated the grass and it looked too radioactive
9. Color efex Pro contrast used on the image to get more detail.
10+11. Added glow to the photo.
12. More contrast to the photo, but not on the darker parts of the building
13. desaturated oversaturated colors
14. nose reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
15. little bit more contrast to the whole image

I also corrected the perspective using perspective crop, and cropped the image to remove the black areas.

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: