I have never played golf, bu hopefully one day I get to try it :) But as I was taking photos from the Cayan tower in the Dubai Marina, this golf course in the distance looked quite interesting. It was the only big green area visible, and it just shined in the middle of the city. So of course I had to take a photo :)

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Yes, another reflection :) This time even with a yacht in the middle. This is actually the only area in the Marina where we were stopped by a security guard for using tripods. But only first time. The second time we were there later at night, and no guard in sight. It’s also a great area to sit down for a dinner in one of the many restaurants there. During my visit, the temperature in the evening was around 20-24 degrees, so just perfect to spend few hours with good friends and good food there :)

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop.

IFTTT

I just recently started using IFTTT and it’s looks quite useful. Especially to automate some thing around the social networks. For those who don’t know, IFTTT (ifttt.com) is a service where you can automate different tasks around different services. I personally set up few for now, like automatically post my instagram photos to twitter, or my flickr uploads to tumblr, so all the staff I always do anyway, and this makes them easier.

I just haven’t found a way to post to twitter, so it generates the hashtags for me. Not sure if it’s even possible :) Any of you use IFTTT? Any tips for good recipes there?

Lost in the reflection

I look for reflections everywhere, and the small pools around the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi are perfect for those. In some the water moves a little, so making it a little harder to get a nice reflection, but some are completely still.

There was a crazy high dynamic range in this photo. I even took 7 exposures, and still the brightest photo was not bright enough. And the very hard transition between bright and very dark areas make the editing quite difficult. It’s very easy to get a lot of haloing or a very hard transition between the two. But somehow I got almost the look I wanted :) Hope you like it :)

This is a HDR from 7 exposures created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

The Burj Khalifa looks great in photos, but it creates the same problem with composition as all the other isolated high buildings. You either leave it out of a photo, or you include it and create a lot of empty space with just the sky. But as one of course wants to have this great building in the photos, one does the best one can :)

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop.

Haven’t posted a before/after post in a very long time, so I hope you will like this new one. I chosen one a little more complicated from the ones I took in Dubai, so let’s go :)

I took this image from the top of Burj Khalifa. This was the final image I had:

I started by taking two exposure series of 4 shots, from -2EV to +1EV. I usually take also the +2EV, but it was just not needed here, and it take a long time anyway. For the two series, once I focused manually onto the city and second time onto the glass wall in front of me. Here are the two 0EV exposures:

As always I started by loading all the shots into Lightroom, where I removed the lens distortion, chrome aberrations, a little noise and corrected the white balance.I also corrected the horizon line.

I then exported all the files into 16-bit Tiffs and created two HDRs with the same settings in Oloneo Photoengine. From there I got this two images:

Then I loaded this two files, together with the original images into Photoshop and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. the HDR from the photos focused on the city
2. HDR created from the photos focused on the glass with a manually painted mask to blend in the top and bottom part, and most of the sky
3+4+5. 0EV focused on the city, with a saturation and brightness modifier, from with I painted in parts of the roads, that had movement in them. The saturation and brightness were needed to adjust the look to fit into the HDR.
6. -2EV focused on the city to darken few bright spots
7. just a merged copy which I needed to be able to use Color Efex pro
8. Color Efex Pro contrast filter, but used a mask to remove it from few bright areas where it overexposed them too much.
9. Color Efex Glamour glow filter. I use this one when the photo has too many sharp details, and I want to soften them a little.
10. Added contrast to the whole image using curves
11. De-saturated magenta colors on a part of the image, where it was too distracting.
12. More contrast to the middle part
13. Played a little with the brightness
14. And once more a little more contrast to the whole image
15. Corrected the overall colors of the image, made it more cooler and greener.

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: