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My crazy year continues, and I again am traveling in two days, with a lot of things I have to take care of before that. So again, I will be only reposting some of my favorite photo in the next few days, until I get back home again.
For today, one of my favorite shots from Dubai.
It’s so nice to have landmarks light up at night. It’s only a problem when you are standing on the landmark, and trying to get a photo from there. You get these very strong flood lights right in your face, and it’s just very hard to get a photo without having lens flares or other problems in it.
If I have only one light there, I try to deal with it as if I had the sun in the shot. Just do multiple series, one with the light shaded. Or I try to shade the lens if the light is outside of the view. But this does not work all the time. Here, I had a lot of problem with the lights creating a glow, as there was still quite a lot of moisture in the air. So I decided to keep the light in the shot, and just do the second series with the light covered. And it worked out quite alright :)
There was no process post last week, as I was away, but let’s get back to one this week. Today I will show you how I edited this night photo from Vienna, so let’s get to it :)
This was taken on a quite cold, rainy evening in the city, so as you can see from the original photo, everything just looked yellow. So thats was one of the main problems I had to correct. I also wanted to create more separation between the bridge, the water and the sky.
Finished photo
Original photoI started in Lightroom, where I did my basic tweaks, like removed chormatic abberations, cropped the image and then also corrected the white balance for a cooler photo. Then I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. I just changed the strength and contrast. Nothing else. That how easy it is usually there :)
All exposures, tweaked in Lightroom
Merged in Oloneo PhotoengineFrom there I continued in Photoshop, where I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo result
2. Copy of layer 1, on which I removed the lens flare visible on the sky and on the bridge
3. -2EV exposure to darken the lights in the middle of the bridge
4. Darkened the bottom border from the -1EV exposure, as it was too bright after the merge
5. Hue/saturation, to tweak the light color under the bridge, which looked too red. Moved it more towards yellow.
6. Another Hue/saturation to tweak the light of the bridge, that looked too green. Moved them more towards yellow.
7. Brightened few dark spots from the +2Ev exposure.
8. I found one more spot in the water, which I removed on this merged copy.
9. Brightened the lights from the -1EV exposure.
10. Color efex Tonal contrast to add more detail into the water.
11. Added a little 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:
It’s so nice in the city at 5 in the morning. I saw only one person on my way from the hotel to this spot. And usually it’s even less :). One has the city all just for oneself. Especially in tourist destinations, this is just wonderful. Nobody to disturb your shot.
This is another view of the Cesky Krumlov center, this time again from a different spot. As the city is placed in the middle of a rivers bend, with hills on every side, one can just walk around, and get a nice view from so many places. And this is one of them :)
Continuing with the photos from Cesky Krumlov, here is another one taken from the castle. Here I used one of the small openings in the castle wall, to get a nice frame of the city center.
I did a focus blend here, with taking a separate exposures focused on the wall and focused on the city. Combined using Photoengine and then focus blended in Photoshop.
