Free eBook for all newsletter subscribers

Maybe some of you have already noticed the change in the sidebar, but I have created my first ever eBook. This one is for free to all, who subscribed to my newsletter. So if you still haven’t, now is your chance :) Head over to the newsletter page for more details, or you can subscribe directly in the widget to the right of this post.

Topaz Star Effects review

There will be still many more reviews on this blog. Today the new one is about the Topaz Star Effects. As I mentioned before, my reviews are short and I try to stick to the point. That is, what the plugin is for, and why you would like to use it. Same this one :).

And btw., between the December 10th and December 31st 2013, you can use the code “decstar” for a 50% discount on this plugin. More information can be found on the Topaz Star Effects site

Sunset at the Michael’s gate

There are not many high spots in the center of Bratislava, so one has to use all one can find. So last week I visited all the towers that are accessible (all two of them :)). I don’t think there are more, but correct me if I’m wrong. I already posted a photo from the Town hall tower earlier, so here is one from the Michael’s gate. It’s not really that all, but in the Old tow, it’s still one of the tallest.

This is a HDR created from 5 shots in Oloneo Photoengine and then merged with original exposures and finished in Photoshop.

Wow.. how quickly the week has passed again. With all the stuff around the contest and the new newsletter, it was over in a second. But again we are at a Tuesday, so we are at another process post.

For today I chosen for you a photo from Maribor, Slovania. As you will see the original photo had quite a good exposure already, so I only had to correct few things to make it a little more interesting.

So to get to this photo:

I started as I always do, with few tweaks in Lightroom. I corrected the horizon, so it’s nice and leveled. Then I corrected the white balance, removed lens distortions and chromatic aberrations and added a little noise reduction.

After that I loaded all the files into Photoshop and did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposure to start with
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and lights in the photo
3. -2EV exposure to darken the brightest lights
4. +1EV exposure to brighten the bridge
5. +2EV exposure to brighten the bridge even more
6. Color efex Pro contrast to correct the colors and add more local contrst
7+8. Added glow to the photo (view my tutorial on this)
9. Brightened the shadow dark’s as I felt the bridge was still too dark.
10. Sharpened the photo using high pass filtering

And that’s all for this photo. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

Your need for noise reduction depends very much on the way you process your photos. Especially HDR processing can create an enormous amount of noise, which has to be dealt with. There are different ways you can do this and I think Imagenomic is one of the best.

Imagenomic Noiseware gives you a big amount of sliders you can push around to remove noise, but in the years I’ve been using it, I never used one. I bet that will make the results better, but the results you get just using the first two under Noise level are good enough in almost all cases.

I also never use it at strong settings. The values go from -20 to +20 and I usually don’t go above 0 for most of my photos. In the sample screenshots I included different situations with different settings.

Recently with Lightroom noise reduction getting much better, the need for a separate noise reduction plugins was not that big. But for some photos, Lightroom can remove very much detail when removing noise. Noiseware can have better results there. I personally use both, Lightroom noise reduction by weaker noise, Imagenomic by stronger noise. Sometimes even both, Lightroom for the initial noise reduction and Imagenomic for finishing touches.

Btw. same as with all noise reduction, be careful not to overdo it. It can remove photo detail and also introduce color banding into your photos.

You can find more information on the plugin on the Imagenomic Noiseware site.

View all my other reviews here.

And the HDRshooter photography contest, sponsored by OLONEO is over. I had for you three copies of Oloneo Photoengine, and here are the winners:

Judges vote

First of all I would like to thank you to the judges Jimmy Mcintyre from ThroughStrangeLens, Daniel Cheong from Daniel Cheong photography and Anthony Gelot from A.G. Photographe, they had a tough job choosing the winner from 170 entries.

But they did, and the winner is number 36, Marek Kijevský with his edit:

I would like to also mention number 170, Reena Goordin, who was a close second.

Facebook voting

The second winner with the most likes on his photo is number 154, Joey Bustamante . His edit:

Raffle winner

And last but not least the winner from the Oloneo Photoenginne raffle, is Ivana Cvijovic.

My congratulations to all the winners and you all will be shortly contacted by me, or by Oloneo.
And here is once more all the 170 entries, so you see how hard the judges job was :)

Last 3 hours

Only 3 hours left to the Oloneo Photoengine giveaway, so if you haven’t done so yet, you still can join in. The winner will be chosen at midnight today. You can join on the contest page.

How to remove lens flares

There is a new guide on the blog, this time dealing with lens flares. So if you want to know how I deal with them and how I remove them, head over to the guide page.

Westminster bridge in the morning

Sometimes I can feel so stupid. I finished editing this photo and by accident I clicked the close button and dismissed the save dialog without realizing what it was. So I dismissed all my work, and had to start from scratch. Good that I remembered at least partially what edits I did, so the repeating process was much faster :)

This is a very early morning view of the Westminster bridge in London. During my stay there earlier this year, my hotel was very close to it, so it was the ideal place to go to take some sunrise photos. But with the ugly weather, the sunrise photos were nothing to be proud off, so at least the blue hour shots were not bad. This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and the manually blended with the original exposures.