If you ever wondered (like I do every-time :)) if you should get up in the middle of the night and go out to take photos of the sunrise, the answer should be always yes. And I think this photo proves my point. You don’t get a sunrise like this each time, but once you get it, all those early mornings were worth it.

This is the Liberty bridge in Budapest, my favorite one from all the bridges there. I really had luck this time, as the sunrise was very colorful for over 1 hour, so I even managed to move few times and get different views. Btw. no blending made on the sky, it’s completely from the -2 exposures, and no added saturation in this photo, just contrast. This is a manual blend from 5 shots, all used mostly to brighten the bridge.

So I’m back from the short trip to Budapest. Again I had a big pleasure to meet up with Elia Locardi and Naomi Locardi and also hit some photo locations with them. For those who follow Elia, you have probably seen his latest The Moments between photo on his Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/elialocardi), so you are probably as much curious about his edit of this view as I am.

This is blend from 3 shots, where only very few small areas were blended. I spend much more time removing scaffolding and 4 cranes from the photo, as the surrounding area of the parliament is a construction site. I hope there are no remains of them in the photo.

I forgot to post a process post last week, but here is a new one for today. This time it’s the Pannonhalma monastery crypt in Hungaria.

So to get to this result

I took 6 exposures, just to be sure that the light are not overexposed. In the end I used files form -3 EV to +1 EV and had no need form the +2 exposure.

So in photoshop I did the following (layers numbered form bottom going up)

1. -1EV exposure
2. 0EV exposure to brighten few areas
3. -2EV exposure to darkend the ligts
4. -3EV exposure to darken the lights even more
5. -4EV exposure, created in Lightroom from -3EV, to darken few lights even more
6. Color Efex Pro contrast to brighten image and add more contrast
7+8. Blured layer and a curves layer to add more glow
9. Color balance to remove the yellow color cast
10. Added 0.7 exposure to brighten the image more
11. Added a little saturaton (around +15)
12. Pro contrast once more, there was still a little colorcast

You will also notice that I corrected the perspective using the Perspective Crop tool in Photoshop

Continue to the full post to see the original -1EV photo, as that’s the one I started with.

Ok, I know it’s not called the Inception bridge (it’s called the Pont de Bir-Hakeim), but if you have ever seen the movie Inception, you know why it’s so much easier to remember it by that :)

I took this photo quite in a hurry one early morning in Paris, while I was on my way to a different location, but I just could not pass it without at least few photos. I got it a little of center, and even with a lot of corrections, it’s still a little off. But not so much that it cannot be shared :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, all blending just to brighten the area under the bridge.

And again something for those who don’t have a good camera, but still want to experiment with HDR. You can download the original raw files for this photo from here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xeaj3in493k5kmu/FysTgnR8XW and try to edit them. Feel free to share you results on my Facebook page.

No contest this time, this time it’s just for the fun of post-processing.

You can also find brackets I shared last time in the folder “other” under the same link

Feel free to share you results on your facebook/flickr/blog, but please don’t forget to give me credit for the photo and link back here. And of course, please don’t use this photo for any commercial purpose (I’m still the author )

Have fun