I hope you all had a great start into the new week, and as almost each Monday, let’s look at one of my photos, and how it was edited. For today, I have for you this blue hour shot, from the Kuchajda lake in Bratislava.

As you can the photo was quite OK already from the start, it just needed to brighten the shadows and get a little more color into it.

Finished photo

Original photo

I started with 5 exposures in Lightroom, where I only did the basic tweaks. I removed lens distortions and chromatic aberations. Then I exported all the file as 16-bit Tiff files and continued in Oloneo Photoengine.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

There I just changed the strength and contrast and saved the result. I loaded all the exposures and Photoengine result into Photoshop and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +2EV exposure, from which I brightened the middle part
3. Color effex pro contrast on the whole image, but toned down a little on the sky, as it created a shadow on the top part.
4+5. Added glow to the photo.
6. Color balance on the middle part to make it warmer.
7. Added contrast to the bottom part of the image.
8. High pass sharpening to add detail to the photo.
9. +2EV exposure again from which I manually blended the light stars around lights.
10. A little more contrast in few areas, especially on the buildings

Photoengine tonemapping

Photoshop edit

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:

Surprisingly, there is still snow in Bratislava today. I even went out, and took few shots, but nothing really spectacular, as it started snowing like crazy, and the lens was nonstop covered in water drops. But how about one where I was a little hidden in this windows in the Bratislava castle fortifications :)

This is manual blend from 3 exposures. Two focused on the bars with one focused on the city. All blended in together in Photoshop.

I can’t believe it, but it’s currently snowing in Bratislava. With a lot of luck, I will be maybe able to get some photos tomorrow. But maybe not. Let’s be surprised :)

And until the, here is one of the photos I took at the lighthouse on the Neusidlersee in Austria.

Around two months ago I posted a review of the LG 34UM95 ultra-wide monitor, and today I share with you some of my observations after two months of using it.

Issues

Let’s first look at the two problems I noticed right at start. The shaking stand and the back-light bleed. Of course both are still there after two months. But none of them are a deal breaker.

The shaking is there only when I type. I type quiet fast and that can create quite a lot of shaking. Other than that, I have seen none, either when editing or playing games.

The back-light bleed is exactly the same as it was in the beginning, but I’m not sure if I got used to it, or I just ignore it. I almost never notice it. I really thought it would be a bigger problem, but it’s exactly the same as the one burnt pixel on my old monitor. If I don’t look for it, I don’t see it.

Movies

Before I look at work performance, lets first look at the other uses. Watching movies on it is just wonderful. Especially 4K content is great. The monitor on it’s own is not 4K, but it’s close enough for the 21:9 content.

HD content still looks good on it, except for the black bars on 16:9 content. Especially thats the moment when you will be able to see the back-light bleed. But again, it’s not such a huge problem that one could not live with it.

Then there is SD content, and on-line videos, especially Youtube. Both look horrible for different reasons. SD content (anything under 720p) just looks too pixelated on a screen this size. It’s OK when you sit far enough, but not up close. Youtube videos are even worse. Even if they are in 21:9 aspect ration (trailers for instance), Youtube adds black bars on top and bottom to them, so they are 16:9. So when you go full-screen with a video like that, you will have a huge black border around it. The only solution is to download the video and then use a player that can scale it, to get it into a usable full-screen.

Games

I love gaming on this monitor. My PC is not one of the strongest, but it runs all games older than 1 year in a very nice 2560×1080 resolution. That’s actually the smallest 21:9 resolution that is available, so anything smaller and you won’t get fullscreen.

It made me even play more games. Especially first person games are so much impressive on this monitor, than on a 16:10 one. You just see so much more. I play mostly RPGs and strategies, so I don’t really care that much about some huge refresh rates, and I never noticed any lag from the screen.

It’s nice to see that more and more games support this aspect ration natively, and with a little tweaking, I managed to get around 90% of games in my Steam library working quite well. Actually, if you are curious how some of them look, you can check the screenshots under my Steam account, where I uploaded quite a lot of them.

Btw. playing turn based strategies in a 2560×1080 window (Civilization mostly), while you watch a video on the side is just perfect :)

Work

And we are getting to the most important thing, how it is to work on this huge monitor. It’s just great to have so much space to work with. Just wonderful for multitasking.

Either if working with multiple browsers, while editing the blog, huge Lightroom window, to see the images, or editing big panoramas in Photoshop, and seeing the whole image all at once.

It’s quite interesting, that for most things one just does not need the whole screen. Even for Photoshop, I have it only on about 2/3rds of the screen most of the time. I like to have a video playing on the side, so that works very well for me.

Also, if you work with modern windows apps, the size works great with the window snapping. Having a Skype chat snapped on the side works just perfectly, and due to the ration it does not even feel like it’s taking up space.

Overall

Overall I don’t regret buying it. It’s a very impressive monitor, and it was well worth the money.

As the weather in Bratislava is still quite horrible, I still have no new photos this year. And with no trip planed yet, there will probably be no new ones still for a while. So as usually, I’m editing photos that I already had, and for today, here is another one from the New years fireworks.

This is a single RAW edited in Oloneo Photoengine and Photoshop.