What a start

What a start indeed. Only yesterday I announced my photo editing contest and already there are over 50 entries. It’s so stunning to see what different people can create with the same photos. And for you all who still haven’t joined, you still have 9 more days to do so. All the rules in yesterdays post, and all the already submitted photos can be seen here.

Long exposure reflections

One thin one always sad to do before shooting long exposures, is to clean the ND filter. I always do so, but it does not really help with my Hoya ND400. The problem is that while I was in Paris last year, it got loose from my camera and fell onto some stones. So now there are small spots all over the filter, that can not be cleaned. But luckily, the filter is still usable, I just need to spend a little longer with cleaning up the photos :)

This is a HDR from 5 shots, created in Oloneo Photoengine (yes, the software you can win in my contest :)) and finished in Photoshop. Taken in the middle of the Dubai Marina.

The time to submit a version has ended, and the voting is in progress in this Facebook gallery. For those who missed the deadline to post your entry, please keep an eye on the blog, there will be another round sooner or later :) 

Thanks to Oloneo software I have for you another round of my editing contest. Again you get a chance to win a copy of their great HDR editing program Oloneo PhotoEngine. If you don’t know PhotoEngine, I really suggest you try it out, as it’s one of the simplest and best HDR editing programs available. You can also see in a lot of my recent photos, that I used it to create the initial blended images, as it creates a very natural look.

You can find all the information on Oloneo and their products here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/home.html
and you can find a trial version you can try right away here: http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/download_form.html?product_id=pe1&type=trial
(there is no Mac version available, but you can run it in a virtual machine)

I will also provide two copies of my Master Exposure Blending tutorial as prizes.

So when you are done playing with it, here is how you can enter the contest. For those who joined already one of my other contests, the rules will be very familiar, as they are the same.

How to join the contest

1. read the complete rules first :)
2. download the provided series of brackets showing a nice sunset at the Neusiedler see in Austria here from Dropbox
3. edit them into a final HDR photo (you can use any software and any technique, tone-mapping, blending, exposure fusion, black&white version)
4. join the contest event here https://www.facebook.com/events/1447780392128154/ and post your photo into the event or send the final edit to me, under miroslav.petrasko@gmail.com with the subject “HDRshooter contest”

Only one entry per person is permitted. Please don’t use parts of any other than the provided photos. If you post your photo to the event page, you can delete your submission and upload a new one. If there is more than one from a person, the last one is entered, all other will be deleted. If you are one of the winners from the last rounds, you are not eligible to win.

Winners

The winners of Oloneo PhotoEngnine will be choosen by:

1st one by a jury of great HDR photographers, Elia Locardi from BlameTheMonkey, Beboy from BeboyPhotography and Dave Morrow from DaveMorrowPhotography

2nd will be selected by fans on Facebook, where everyone can vote for their favorites, once all the entries have been submitted. This voting is not in the event.  Sharing of your entries further to promote them is permitted, but entries with fake likes will be disqualified.

In both cases the person who places 2nd will receive a copy of the Master Exposure Blending video tutorial.

The latest time to submit you entry is 18th May 2014 at midnight. The voting on the winner will be held during the week from 19th to 25th May 2014 on the HDRshooter facebook page. The winners will be announced on the Monday 26th

I hope you will all have fun editing and good luck to you all :)

I reserve the right to change or amend the competition rules at any time without prior notice. By entering the competition, entrants agree to be bound by these rules. All participants can’t use the final photo for any commercial use and have to give credit to me as the original author, also I will not use their versions for any purposes other than promotion of this competition. Participants can share the photo on their FB, blog, flickr or other accounts, but still have to give me credit as the author and link back to the contest.

I got to the Burj Khalifa very late the day I was there. The problem was, that when I booked my ticket (around a week before my trip) all the good time were already completely sold out. Of course no chance for a sunset time, but luckily, I got one for my last day in Dubai, for the blue hour. Of course when I got up, it was already after the blue hour, but that just means that next time I’m booking my ticket a month before my visit :)

This is a HDR from 4 shots, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. I took this one through the glass wall there, as I wanted more reflection from the building, and my tripod was not high enough to get enough over the wall.

I will really have to go back to Dubai one day. Still so many spots I wanted to visit. But on the other hand, I managed to visit so many great places in the week there. It was really worth the trip. Like this one. This is a view from a heliport of one of the skyscrapers in downtown Dubai.

This is a HDR from 3 exposures (I took 5 but had no use for the two brightest) created in Oloneo Photoengine and created in Photoshop.

How about a process post today? Again I chosen a little more complicated photo, a vertorama. It’s only from two shots, but it nicely shows the whole process. So to get to this photo from Bardejovske Kupele, I did the following:

As always I started with loading all the files into Lightroom. There were 10 of them in total, but I could go with fewer of them anyway. I just took 5 different exposures to be sure I have enough.

I corrected lens distortion and white balance and exported all as 16-bit tiff files. Those I loaded into PTGui, to create the vertorama blends. (this is explained in detail in the HDR panoramas tutorial)

From where I ended with 5 vertoramas, which I then loaded in Oloneo Photoengine. There simply by changing the strength and contrast I got this result:

Continuing, I loaded all the vertoramas and also the Photoengine result into Photoshop, where I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3+4+5. This is the vertorama created from the 0EV expsurs, modified for color and exposure and then blended into the Oloneo result. I needed to replace the sky, as there was ghosting from the moving clouds.
6. -2EV to darken few small parts
7. +2EV to brighten few ares
8. desaturated the grass and it looked too radioactive
9. Color efex Pro contrast used on the image to get more detail.
10+11. Added glow to the photo.
12. More contrast to the photo, but not on the darker parts of the building
13. desaturated oversaturated colors
14. nose reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
15. little bit more contrast to the whole image

I also corrected the perspective using perspective crop, and cropped the image to remove the black areas.

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: