New blog address

Maybe some of you already notices, but from yesterday the address of this blog is no longer blog.hdrshooter.net, but a new one, www.hdrshooter.com. I planed this change for a long time, and I hope it makes the address easier to type and also easier to remember :)

Of course the old address will continue to work, it will just forward you to the new one.

In the metro

I’m still feeling sick, so another quick edit today. This time it’s a photo from Prague metro. I used a stronger noise reduction as usual on this one, as I wanted to get rid of the smaller details, to give it a more cleaner look.

This is a HDR created from 2 exposures in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with one of the exposures in Photoshop.

For this weeks process post, I have for you something a little different. In this one I will show you how to create this blurred effect in Photoshop. It quite simple, and it can create a really interesting result.

So to get a result like this:

I started with this photo as the base. It’s one of my older HDR, and this effect also looks best on scenes with trees.

So the first thing I did was to duplicate the layer. On this new layer I used the Motion blur (Filter -> Blur -> Motion blur) and played around with the values until I got the look I wanted.

Next I added a mask to the blurred layer, and using a black soft brush at 100% I brushed over the parts where I wanted the original photo to show through. Then I changed the opacity to 30% and softened the transition.

That actually makes the whole effect. But I also suggest running a filter like Color Efex Pro contrast, as the blurred version will be lacking in the contrast area.

And that’s it. If you give it a try, and create an interesting result, feel free to share your results in the comments :)

1 000 000 views

And I just got another milestone for one of my accounts. This time it’s the first 1 000 000 vies on my Flickr portfolio under http://www.flickr.com/photos/theodevil/. I actually started publishing my photos there, and it’s the oldest of all my photo accounts :)

The colorful Eiffel tower

I never can edit photo when my head hurts. And as I just got a cold, my head hurts like crazy. So for today, I only have a very quick edit of a night photo from Paris. And I’m going to bet to get some sleep :)

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop.

Photomatix Pro 5 – Review

My review of Photomatix pro is quite short, but as I described a lot of it in my HDR tutorial, you can find much more there. But anyway, you can find my review of Photomatix Pro 5 here.

Blown away

You very often read in headlines, that a photo will blow you away. I personally try to avoid that types of descriptions in my photos, as they never mean anything. But here it is different. While I was taking this, the strong wind almost blown me away :) It of course took away a lot of sharpness from the photo, but I think its still manageable.

This is a single exposure edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

10k and 100k

Recently I have been more active on my 500px account and today I reached my first milestone there. Or better said two of them. Today I got 10 000 affection (thats a metric that combines all likes and favorites there) and secondly I reached my first 100 000 views there. Many thanks to all of you who visit and vote for my photos there :)

Soft color of the cold evening

Not really sure why I left a little softer colors in this one. I even left a little yellow color cast here. Maybe because while I was editing I was listening to great music (Beatles, Queen, Abba, New order and similar :)) that I got in a particular mood. Still, I like the result very much, and I hope you will too.

This is of course the Apollo bridge in Bratislava, and one of my favorite spots there. This is a HDR from 5 exposures created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with two of the original exposures in Photoshop.