Another view you get only at a certain time. Right after sunrise, when the sunrises above the Pest side of Budapest, it lights up the castle, while everything else is still in shadow. And if you are on the Chain bridge at that time, you get a view like this.

This is a panorama form 2 tiles, each tile from 3 exposures, combined in Oloneo Photoengine.

Technique: Manual blend, Number of exposures: 2×3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 30mm, Aperture: 13, Middle exposure time: 1/15s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 47.499114, 19.044873

Photoengine Summer sale

If you thought about picking up Oloneo Photoengine, now is a good time. Oloneo is currently having a summer sale, and you can get Photoengine for 50 euro off until the end of this months. Just head over to the Oloneo page and use code SUMMER2015PE

Green light on the bridge

If you are at the exact time at the Charles bridge in Prague, when they turn on the lights, for a few seconds, you can get a photo with the bridge being green. It’s a results of the lights warming up and most people miss it :) You can actually see it by quite a lot of landmark lights, for instance the Chain bridge in Budapest has the same. You just have to have the right timing.

This is a HDR from 3 exposures created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 59mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 10.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 50.08441, 14.41323

I don’t really like photos taken in the middle of very sunny days. But if I’m on a location because of something I have to take a photo of, that why not take some more. Same here with this photo from Spitz in Austria. It was just crazy sunny when I took this. It was like that for most of the last month anyway. Almost no clouds the whole time, and huge temperatures. At least it got a little colder now :)

This is a HDR from 3 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 27mm, Aperture: 14, Middle exposure time: 1/50s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.358472, 15.406886

Time to add new wallpapers again. Today it’s two new ultra wide ones in 3440×1440. Get them as usually form the wallpapers page :)

Let’s look today on one of my recent photos and how it was edited. This time it’s this late night panorama taken in Prague by the Charles bridge. This was a two tile panorama which I took without the help of a panorama head. Actually a lot of my panoramas are done this way. If you are far enough from the subject, and you are using a longer focal length, you don’t really need a panorama head. The stitching software is intelligent enough to work with the small amount of paralax effect you will get.

Here you can see bigger versions of the middle exposures I used.

Overall I used 10 exposure, I went from -2 to +2EV, as there were some quite dark areas, and also few very bright lights.

I started in Lightroom, where I only removed the chromatic aberrations, lens distortions and vignetting and corrected a little the white balance (it was too much towards red). From there I exported everything as 16-bit tiffs and loaded them into PTgui. For a detailed process how I combine shots there, check out the specific tutorial on creating HDR panoramas.

I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. As always, I just added a bit of strength, until I get a nice even exposure, from which I could start with. Setting of around 50 works the best usually. Same here. To continue I loaded everything into Photoshop and continued with the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Painted in the +1EV into the water, to remove the blend of the moving lights
3. Merged copy, where I filled in few areas around the corners, that were empty form the panorama blend
4. Darkened the bright lights from the -1EV exposure.
5. Brightened part of the reflection, to make it more visible
6. Retouched out all the people on the bridge
7. Corrected a stray light on the bridge
8. Few more bright spots corrected from the -2EV
9. The tower in the back lost all the contrast in the blend, so I recovered it from the 0EV exposure
10. Color Efex tonal contrast, with settings 10, 15, 10 and 10. These are my most used settings for this plugin
11+12. Curves and color balance, to correct the uneven brightness and color of the photo. I made the right part darker and more saturated.

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: