Giveaway reminder

For all those who still haven’t joined my Oloneo Photoengine giveaway, you still have 3 more days to do so. The winner will be chosen this Sunday at midnight. To join, just go to the contest page and use the Rafflecopter widget.

How to organize photos

Just finished reading (and watching) Trey Ratcliffs latest book/tutorial Organize Your Photos – The Three Level System. I’ve been using Treys approach to organization for a longer time, since I read his older book about this subject. But the new version now splits this into three levels based on your obsession with your organization. I can honestly say, I’m level 3, I’m very obsessive with my organisation. But as my Lightroom library is around 100 000+ photos, I have to be. Still the new book gave me a few new ideas what to change and tweak, even if I still have to clean up a big part of my own library.

So if you are looking for a way to organize you photos, this new book could be for your. You can find it here Organize Your Photos – The Three Level System (BONUS), and if you decide to buy it, you can use the code “SIC-6591” for a 10% discount :)

Almost perfect reflection

I think I mentioned it before, but the Kuchajda lake is the best place for reflections in Bratislava. It’s always very calm, and the sunset look just great there. You can almost think that this reflection is fake, created in Photoshop, as it just looks too perfect. But I can assure you, this is really how it looked like. And since the whole week we have great sunsets in Bratislava, I had one also yesterday. This photo is even taken a little later, after the best colors already faded, when the blue hour already began. But I processed it first, as in the sunset photos you cant see the building lights so much. Either way, I will get to those later anyway.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with original exposures in Photoshop.

Analog Efex is the latest addition to Nik Collection. For the first week I hated it, as it’s in the menu before Color Efex, so I always opened it by accident, when trying to get to Color Efex, but after a while I got used to it.

As already the name suggest, Analog Efex simulated different effects of analog cameras. I’m only a partial fan of such effects. I like them on street shots, portrait shots and overall shots with a vintage feel (that’s why I chosen the sample photo of a vintage camera :)). But that usually does not fit with landscape or architecture photos. It also removes too much of the original photo.

But there are situations when this is preferable. For instance if you are making a page, that has a overall vintage feel, the photos would fit to it.  Of course with services like Instagram, this look is very popular. One can’t argue, that this type of filter hides a lot of problems with photos. If your photo is noisy, blurry, dirty and so on, it will be just more authentic. But if you do it through a plugin like the Analog Efex, the result will bu much better, and you also have much more control of it.

In the Analog Efex you can either choose from predefined presets from Classic cameras, Wet plates, Toy cameras or Vintage cameras. Or you can start from scratch, and put together effects to get a look you want for yourself. There is a big list of effects, including Lens distortion, Bokeh, Blur, Light leak, Dirt, Scratches, Vignette and more.

So in the end, if you have a need to use such a vintage look in you project, or you are a fan of this look, I suggest you give this plugin a try.

For additional information on Analog efex, you can visit the Nik collection site here http://www.google.com/nikcollection/. Google does not offer any discount codes there, but if you look around, you maybe find one of the old ones, and can get the collection for a little cheaper :)

View all my other reviews here.

Contest voting

The contest voting over on Facebook is up to a fast start, with hundreds of likes already given to the submitted photos. Check them all out in this Facebook album.

Nik Color Efex Pro 4 Review

I’m slowly adding more reviews of all the software and hardware I have been using. This time it is of the Nik Color Efex Pro Photoshop plugin. My reviews focus more on what I like and use about the software, but I think some of you will find them helpfull :)

Christmas market in Bratislava

As in a lot of cities, there is also a Christmas market in Bratislava. And as I didn’t get any photos of it last year, I was searching for a nice vantage point to take a photo now. But I was not in the mood to take photos in the middle of all those people, so I went up to the Town Hall tower, to take photos from there. The view was nice, it was just freaking cold there :).

This is a HDR created from 5 exposures in Oloneo Photoengine and the combined with original exposures in Photoshop.

Recently I’ve been taking more “Behind the camera” shots, so I’m also including one from that evening.

Compared to Nik Color Efex or Silver Efex, this one is a little different. Where others are a group of different filters, or a group of presets of one filter. This one is a tool to adjust the basics of a photo. You get only four basic sliders (Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Structure) and 6 additional sliders (Shadows, Warminth, Hue and the Red, Green and Blue channel adjustment). The list is finished with a curves adjustment, you can use on any of the channels.

So as I said, the Viveza only has a basic set of tools. But it has one trick up it’s sleeve. It allows you to add control points to your photo. Once a control point is dragged onto a photo, it creates and automatic selection, based on the color it was placed on. Once this is done, you have all the mentioned sliders available for that specific point. So you don’t affect the whole photo, but jut the selected part. It’s similar to using Color range in Photoshop to define your selections.

You can also affect the radius around the point, in which this selection is made. Don’t be surprised if the effect is also outside the radius, as the area is determined by both, the radius and the similarity of colors.

Another nice thing is, that you can group points into groups and so are able to affect multiple parts of the image at once.

Overall Viveza can make you editing process faster, as it takes away the need to mask out areas for where you want to apply an adjustment. I suggest you give it a try.

For additional information on Viveza, you can visit the Nik collection site here http://www.google.com/nikcollection/. Google does not offer any discount codes there, but if you look around, you maybe find one of the old ones, and can get the collection for a little cheaper :)

View all my other reviews here.

Another week just passed, and again I’m getting to another process post. So as always I will show you how I edited one of my recent photos. For today I chosen this photo from Austria, from this stunning sunset at the Neusidler see. So to get to this final photo, I did the following

As always I started in Lightroom, where I corrected the lens distortion and removed Chromatic aberrations. After that I exported all the files as 16bit Tiff files.

Then I took them and loaded in Photomatix Pro 5. I used the Contrast Optimizer to get a nice even image, a good start for additional blending.

After that I loaded the Photomatix result together with the original exposures into layers in Photoshop, and continues as follows (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Photomatix result
2. recovered detail in the water from the 0EV exposure
3. recovered detail in the sky from the -1EV exposure
4. brightened the pillars from the +2EV exposure
5. used Color Efex Pro Contrast to add more color and contrast to the photo

6+7. added glow (view my glow tutorial for details)
8. color balance to make the photo a little warmer
9. used Color Efex Glamour glow to soften the colors a little
10. used Color Efex Detail extractor, to get more detail in the sky and water
11. used Color Efex Darken/Lighten Center to add a vignette. This should have been the last point, but in the end I did few more edits on the photo.
12. curves to add more contrast
13. a little more Color Efex Pro contrast, as I felt the photo needed more local contrast
14. noise reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
15. added more color to the sunset
16. finished with a little more contrast

Not maybe the nicest use of layers, but it got me to the finished photo. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV shot and the Photomatix result.