I quite quickly planed another shot trip for this week, this time to Hallstatt and Salzburg in Austria, and due to other work, I again ended up with no photos/posts ready for the blog. But instead of reposting some older photos, I will highlight some of the guides available on this blog, during the next few days.

So for today, a reminder that you can find two guides on how to combine HDR panormas here. There are two, as one shows how it’s done in Autopano Giga and the second one in PTGui. So here they are:

creating HDR panoramas in Autopano Giga

creating HDR panoramas in PTGUI

For today, another photo from the Northern Austria, or as it’s also know, Wachau. The whole area is just beautiful, with castles, vineyards and many great photo opportunities.

This is a blend from two exposures, edited in Photoshop.

Technique: Manual blend, Number of exposures: 2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 52mm, Aperture: 14, Middle exposure time: 1/20s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.358472, 15.406886

Let’s look a the editing process of one of my recent photos today. This one is a fisheye shot, of the John Frost bridge in Arnhem, in Netherlands.

For this shot, I decided to remove the distortion completely, to see how it looks. So here you can see the final and the original exposure, side by side.

I started the edit in Lightroom. For all of the 5 exposures, I removed the lens distortion (the last Lightroom version supports the fisheye lens), removed chromatic abberations, tweaked the white balance and toned down the highlights a little. From there I exported all the exposures and merged them in Oloneo Photoengine. As always, just by changing the strength and contrast.

To finish the photo, I loaded the Photoengine result and the original exposures into Photoshop and did these edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Photoengine result
2. 0EV exposure to correct errors created by moving objects and water
3. Darkened the green area on the pillar from the -2EV exposure
4. Color efex pro contrast, to brighten the image, used more stronger on the bottom part of the image
5. A little bit of overall brightness using curves
6. A little bit of overall contrast using curves
7. Even more contrast
8. More saturation into the blue colors
9. Brightened the dark pars a little more
10. Noise reduction on the bottom part (got noise due to the fact that it was brightened a lot)
11+12. Darkened the horizont from the -2EV exposure, and saturated it more
13. Overall color balance shifted a little toward warmer colors

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:

To break a little from the photos from Austria, Budapest and Prague, I looked back through my photos from the United Arab Emirates, and chosen another one to edit. So today, a photo from the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

This is a blend from 3 photos, created in Photoshop.

Technique: Manual blend, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 8, Middle exposure time: 0.4s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 24.413264, 54.475468

You have already seen many photo with the Budapest parliament reflection in the Danube. Few of those even on this blog :). But today, I have for you a little opposite reflection of the parliament. This time it’s the reflection of it in the new fountain, that was added in the last year. I’m very happy that I could find a new, different view of the parliament, one I didn’t had before. Btw. the bright light to the side of the parliament, is the Moon.

I had to place the camera around 1-2 centimeters from the water, to be able to get this reflection. Good that one can get really close, as it’s more of a waterfall, than a fountain. One just has to be careful, as in some areas, it’s more powerful, and one could get water on the lens. This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Manual blend, Number of exposures: 5, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 7.1, Middle exposure time: 4s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 47.506787, 19.047424