This will be a little shorter post, as I only arrived home about a hour ago and I’m dead tired. In the last week I visited many places and had some opportunities to take few photos. But as it is currently much hotter here than it should be, there is almost no snow at all. So to at least have a little bit of the atmosphere, here is one huge Christmas ball.

I took this one while stooping for a while in the city Poprad. There were many nice decorations there, but I struggled a little to get a nice shot, as it was raining and the city was full of people. But somehow I managed to get this one without them. This huge Christmas ball also seemed to be a quite popular place to pose and take photos, so it was someone in it most of the time.

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

Smugmug – review

I’ve been using Smugmug as my photo host and portfolio site for a few years now, so I thought I put together a short review of it. Head over to the Smugmug – review page for more.

At the Neusiedlersee

I should be back in Bratislava today, and hopefully I also got few new shots during the last days (I have no idea if I got something, as I’m writing this a week before :)). So lets be surprised together tomorrow. Until then, here is another photo from the best sunset I seen in 2013.

This is a manual blend from 5 exposures, taken at the Neusiedlersee in Austria.

TK Actions

One of the best resources to help you with luminosity masking is the page by Tony Kuyper. He offers a lot of tutorials and descriptions for how to create them and use them. He also offers his own Photoshop panel, designed to help you use Luminosity masking in a very simple way. For all interested in the subject, I suggest you visit his tutorial page. for more information.

Autumn Sun

A little simpler photo than my usual ones, but I liked the how the sunset looked so much, that I’m posting it. I haven’t had much chances to take photos of nature this year, so at least like this I can balance the content of my blog. Of course it’s another thing I have to correct the next one. I actually started making a list of what everything I want to add tho this blog, reviews, guides and other contest, and the list is quite big already. Let’s see if the year is long enough :)

This photo is a manual blend from two shots, one for the sky, one for the trees. Edited fully in Photoshop.

This week I moved the process post to Wednesday, as you know, it was Christmas yesterday :) And so I also thought I show you a photo with Christmas decorations in it. So to get to this final photo:

I started as always in Lightroom. I removed chromatic aberrations and lens distortion. After that I corrected the horizon, as it was not completely straight. Then I synced the settings to all of the brackets and exported them as 16-bit Tiff files.

My next step was to merge them into a HDR file in Oloneo Photoengine. I changed the TM Strengths to even out the exposure and then added a bit of contrast and adjusted the temperature of the image. I saved the result as another 16-bit Tiff file.

I continued by loading the Photoengine result and the original files into layers in Photoshop (by using Bridge to load them). Once there I did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3. 0EV exposure brightened by one stop and then used to remove a moving person from the photo
4. +1EV to correct ghosting in few areas
5+6. +2EV exposure darkened by 1 stop and then used to remove more ghosting
7. merged the first layers and removed multiple persons from the photo using content aware and other retouching tools. I also removed all the dust spots that were visible.
8. used 0EV exposure with a brights luminosity mas to brighten the tree
9. Color Efex Pro contrast to recover photo contrast lost in HDR blending.
10. Noise reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
11. Color Efex Darken/Lighten center, to create a vignette effect.
12. Curves used to darken few parts of the corners, that were still too bright
13. Added more exposure to most of the image to brighten it up. The additional brightness was not applied to the brightest parts of the image.
14. Brightened the extreme dark areas of the photo
15. Used curves to add more contrast to the tree

I also used the Perspective Crop tool, to correct the distortion of the photo, as the tree was falling in the original one.

Please continue to the full post to see the oringinal 0EV exposure and the Oloneo Photoengine result. Or you can continue to the photo post, to see the camera info and where this photo was taken.

As every year, I’m adding a selection of my favorite shots I took during this year. And what should be a better day for this than on Christmas :). But first of all Merry Christmas to you all.

I visited few new countries (more than last year, but not as much as I would like) this year, and I think I got some great photos. So let’s get the new year started and hopefully it will be filled with a lot of great photos, taken at even better locations :)

Here you can see my favorites from 2012, 2011 and 2010 :)

And here are my favorites from 2013