Tsu

Some of you have maybe noticed, that another social network opened recently. It’s called Tsu, and it shows another, different approach to social networks. I have created an account there, just to reserve my user-name (one never know what the future brings :)) but for now I’m not sure if I will post there regularly. I mentioned it before, I want to scale down on my social networks, and use less of them. It just takes too much time and effort to be active everywhere. Already, on some of the networks I post only an update when I create a new blog post, and probably thats the fate for even more of them. I rather spend the time, I spend maintaining accounts, by writing more articles for the blog.

But if you want,  you can find me under http://www.tsu.co/miroslavpetrasko

Above the Chain bridge

I posted already quite a few photos from the St. Stephans fireworks in Budapest, and here is another one. As I mentioned with my first photo from there, for the start, I was at a really bad spot. And here you can see it. The view of the bridge was great, it just had one big problem. Most of the fireworks were not above the bridge. So if I stayed there, I would miss moss of all the fireworks. So right in the middle of them, I decided to move, and you already seen photos I got after that :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom, Oloneo Photoengine and Photoshop. The fireworks were a little smaller, so the scenery stayed a little darker than I would like, but at least the whole focus in on the fireworks :)

What day is today? Is it another Monday? It is, so it’s time for a new process post :) For today, I chosen this photo I took on my way from Zermatt in Switzerland. We just stopped the car next to the road, as I really wanted to capture the curving of it. So here goes.

As always, here is the finished and the original photo.

Finished photo

Original photo

I took 5 exposure for this, but I probably would be OK with 1 or 2. I just take more to be sure. I started my edit in Lightroom, where I removed the lens distortion, chromatic aberrations and corrected the white balance.

All exposures

After Lightroom edits

From there I exported all the exposures as 16-bit tiff files, and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. To get the result I wanted, I just changed the strength, and added a little contrast. From there I loaded the result and all the original exposures, into layers in Photoshop and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3. I removed the car on the side and corrected the white line around the road
4. Corrected few ghosted cars by blending in parts from the +1EV exposure
5. Merged copy where I cleaned out dust spots
6. Brightened the clouds from the +2EV exposure
7. Color Efex Pro contrast to get more detail into the picture
8. Little desaturation on the yellow colors
9. Color Efex Detail extractor to get more detail into the rocks
10. Brightened a little few shadows using the +2EV exposure
11+12. Added glow to the photo
13+14. Added ore contrast to the photo
15+16. Added more detail to the grass using Color Efex Tonal contrast, and desaturated it after that, so the colors are not overly saturated.

After Photoengine edit

Photoshop screenshot

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:

I haven’t had the best last week, first I killed of my PC and had to reinstall everything, and then I even got sick. So today I only did a quick edit of one of my photos from Basel, and I’m going to rest now.

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, with a 5th exposure blended in to remove the ghosting. You may find it strange that I used ISO 1600 for this, but that was a mistake. I was taking the faster exposure for the boats, and I changed everything back, just not the ISO. But surprisingly, the amount of noise was quite manageable :)
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Photos by location

To see my photos from a certain location, you can use a dropdown from the sidebar. Just search for Photos by location, and choose the location you are interested in :)

Mountains

Sometimes 20Mpix is just not enough. I just love detail in my photos, and in the scenes like this one, one could just have more and more of it :) This is a view of Zermatt, from the Swarzsee.

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

There are so many shortcuts in Photoshop. But not all are equally useful, as if one does something only really rarely, it’s just not worth it to learn the shortcut. But some, are just essential, and once you learn them, you will be using them constantly. This is more for beginners, for those who are only starting in Photoshop, as I hope everyone who worked already longer with Photoshop, knows all of them :)

These are also the ones I use the most while editing my photos in Photoshop. For those of you who use a Mac, you just have to replace Ctrl with Cmd.

Space – pan

I think this is the very first shortcut everyone has to learn. When you hold the space-bar, the cursor will change into a hand, and you can move the image around. This is so much quicker than looking for the pan too in the toolbox, or zooming out and back in into the image.

Ctrl + Space – zoom in

Another thing that will really help you to move around the photo. Holding Ctrl + Space will switch you to the Zoom in tool. If you only click with the mouse, you will zoom in. But if you hold the left mouse button at the same time, and move the mouse cursor up and down, you will zoom in/zoom out. I also like to click the right mouse button while hoding Ctrl + Space, to open a selection menu, from where I can quickly choose Fit to screen, to see the whole image.

D – reset colors

This one very important shortcut, especially when working with masks and brushes. Pressing D will reset your foreground color to black, and background color to white. Once you know this, you will never ever again need to open the color picker to get these two colors :)

X – switch colors

This one works together with the previous one. When you start using luminance masks and painting into them, you very often need to change from black to white and back. And here where X comes in. Pressing it will switch the foreground and background color. While masking, you will use this very often.

F – full screen

This one is more about the interface, but also very helpful. Pressing F will switch you into the full-screen mode. There are three states for it, that you circle trough. Normal mode, full screen and full screen without the toolbars. If you have a smaller screen, this shortcut is a must.

Shift + Backspace – fill dialog

Fill dialog is normally used when you want to fill a selection or the whole image with a single color, but for me it’s much more useful to use content aware fill on a selection. I just select an area, hit Shift + Backspace, select content aware fill (if you don’t change the selection, Photoshop remembers the last one used) and hit enter. This is probably the quickest way to get rid of unwanted objects in a photo.

Ctrl + E – merge layer

Merge layer will take the layer you are currently on and merge it with the layer under it. I use this mostly, when doing small retouching edits on a photo, and I just create a new copy to do the edit, or do it on an empty layer. Once I’m done, I just hit the shortcut to merge the edit back into the layer.

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E – merge visible into new layer

This one is not so easily to press, but doubly useful for that. What it does, it will create a new layer for you, which will include a merged copy of all the layers under it. This is very usefull if you need to do an edit that requires a pixel layer, or you want to use a filter effect on the whole image, including all the adjustment layers.

Ctrl + D – deselect

This shortcut any selection you currently have. It very useful as if one uses masking, and luminosity masks, one tends to work with the selection hidden. So it can often happen that you sill have a selection and don’t know about it. Just hitting this shortcut will get rid of it immediately.

Ctrl + Shift + I – invert selection

Knowing this one is will help mostly when using masks. Knowing how to quickly invert a selection can streamline the editing process greatly. Most of the times, if you don’t have to open the Photoshop menus, the more efficiently you work.

Ctrl + Alt + Z – step backward

The undo does not work exactly the same in Photoshop as in other programs. In Photoshop, just hitting Ctlr + Z will let you go back only one step. If you hit it again, you will just redo that one step. If you want to go more back, you have to use this longer shortcut. With this you can go back through the whole available history of your edits.

And thats all for this list :)