Continuing with another shot from Austria. This was not a part of my recent trip, but I went there today. Hainburg is very close to Bratislava, so it took only a short while to get there. And since there is a nice hill right next to it, and you can get with a car to the top of it, it’s great for a quick sunset shooting. No luck for clouds, but still the view was really nice.

This is a manual blend from 4 shots.

There will be few more beautiful green landscapes now, as that’s what I took most photos in Austria. This is a view from another castle ruin (I visited three in those two days there), this one being the the Durnstein Castle. It gives you a very nice exercise to get up to it, but the view is worth it.

This is a manual blend from 8 shots. I actually took 12 here, two series of 6. One time for the scenery, and the second series with my hand in front of the sun, so I can remove all the lens flares the sun created. This photo was really not easy to edit :)

New Smugmug

Today it will be a little longer post :). So first thing. Smugmug changed it’s look recently so I also changed the way my portfolio page (www.hdrshooter.net) looks. I think it looks better now, but I still have to do a lot more customization to it, so it look less generic. But all takes time. But one thing they added, which I really like, is that you can change the order of the photos in a gallery. Finally :)

1 000 000 photo views

When on the Smugmug topic. I checked my statistics there and I just reached 1 000 000 photo views as counted from the 1st January of this year. Big thank you to all who visited my potfolio, and I hope you will again find reasons to take a look at it :)

Top 5 spots in Paris

Also maybe some of you noticed a new addition to the Top 5 spots category. This time I added the Top 5 photography spots in Paris. As I’m not yet such familiar with the whole of Paris, please take this more as a top 5 must visit spots there. All give you great photo opportunities and should be visited.

View from the Aggstein castle ruins

And finally the daily photo. Today it’s the view form the Aggstein castle ruins in Austria. The view from there is just stunning and you don’t even have to walk up there, as the road goes completely up to the castle :) I could spend hours here. If you are ever close by, I definitively suggest a visit.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

I got a little behind on uploading a new post, as I took a short photo trip to Austria these last two day and got home only very late at night. So for now, here is the first edited photo from Durnstein and there will be more to come.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

Today I have for you another photo process post. This photo of the Bojnice castle is one of the most popular photos I ever posted, so I think the way I edited it would be interesting to you. So to get to this final image:

I used luminance mask to combine the shots. To be exact I did the following steps (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. original 0EV exposure
2-3. -1EV and -2EV exposure to darken the sky and other bright spots
4-5. +1EV and +2EV exposure to brighten the foreground
6. -1EV exposure once more to recovel some lost contrast from the blending
7. added contrast to basic midtones
8. added detail using high pass layer
9. darkened and added contrast to the brighterst parts of the image
10. added more local contrast using the Color efex Tonal contrst preset
11. added more contrst using the Color Efex Pro contrast preset
12. removed noise in the foreground elements
13-14. added glow using a blured layer
15. additional brightening for dark areas

To see the original 0EV exposure, please continue to the full post