Clear blue sky at Pont de pierre

I really do very few vertical photos. You may have noticed on this blog, there are not many of them. I just don’t like them. The only exception is when I do a vertorama, and even those are more often in a square format than a portrait one. And they don’t really fit landscapes anyway. But let’s do one of the rare ones I have taken today.

This is a single photo, split into three and then blended back together in Photoshop. I took three photos originaly, but something caused movement of the camera, and they would not align properly. This is the Pont de Pierre in Bordeaux, France, during a very blue hour. No clouds in sight.

Podersdorf lighthouse 4k wallpapers

And here are the 4 new ones. As always, these are available for download in 3840x2160px resoulution.

Takes too much storage

Ok, the biggest reason again, is just the size. I even had to switch to PSB from PSD files for my photos, as the PSD is limited to 2GB in size and most of my photos will not fit into that. And with adding more and more photos every day, this gets into terabytes over time. And of course, you have to at least double this, as one needs a backup all the time.

This became a smaller problem over the years, as the price for storage is going down all the time, and even 8 and 10tb hard drives are quite cheap now. Still, it’s a huge amount of storage, that you have to deal with.

You will almost never go back

I keep a full JPG version of my photos, a web-sized JPG version of my photos and a PSD version with all the editing layers. Do I ever go back and re-edit the PSD files? I can’t remember a time I did that. I could probably just flatten them and save that as a much smaller PSD, a TIFF or something similar.

Since they are also so big, they open quite slower, and a lot of programs can’t even show a preview of them at all.

Always backing up RAW files

I, and I think you should too, always back up your RAW files. Being able to go back, and re-edit a file you took years ago, with new software and new techniques you learn is just great. But in this case, you would start from the beginning, with the RAW file. One would not go back to the PSD and try to re-edit from an already finished version.

You can see and show how you edited a photo

Probably the biggest reason I keep the files for myself. Here and there I show sometimes how a photo was edited, and in the past, I did that regularly on the blog here. But I stopped doing that, as in reality, you can’t really learn that much from that. One does not need to know how a photo was edited, but which techniques were used to do so. What works on one photo does not have to work on another.

Dubai marina in the distance

While this photo looks like a panorama, it is not. In reality, it’s a shot from the 12mm Laowa lens, that I cropped down. I was not standing directly on the rocks, and I wanted to include them in the shot, while having the whole Dubai marina behind it. So I used the 12mm to get the rocks in the shot and kept it leveled to avoid perspective distortion. But that resulted in a lot of empty sky, that I did not like. And after I cropped it off, I got this panoramic view from it.

This shot is taken from Palm Jumeirah and the rocks in the front are of course part of the palm. This is a blend from two exposures, done in Photoshop.

Morning sun at the Liberty bridge

Let’s do a nice warm photo, even if the day I took it was not really that warm. This photo was taken one early autumn day in Budapest, very very early in the morning. It was raining during the night, and I was not even sure if I go out to take photos. But I woke up, and I gave it a try. And it was one of the nicest sunrises I ever seen. Not that it works like that every time. Most of the time you are happy if you get a nice photo at all.

This photo is a blend from 5 exposures done in Photoshop. There is a bit of a final touch done with Topaz Adjust AI.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. You can see why I needed to use so many brackets this time.