The Eiffel tower can just be framed so nicely. Usually it’s not the first type of composition I go for, but here it was just so obvious, that I had to do it :)
This is a manual blend from 5 shots.
I was thinking of what I haven’t yet taken photos in Bratislava and what is close to my flat (I really was not in the mood for a longer bus ride with the 30+ degree weather here). So I chose for my destination the Polus City center. You have seen few photos of it from the backside, as there is the Kuchajda lake, but this time, it’s the main entrance.
This is a manual blend from 5 shots.
Today I tried focus blending for the fist time (even if I took this photo few months earlier :)). For those who don’t know what focus blending is, its a process, where you take multiple photo with each of them focused on a different part of the scene. Then you combine the sharp parts from these photos so you have one photo which is completely in focus. Here I took two 5 bracket series, one focused at the rock near the camera and one at the hills in the distance. At the end I used only 3 photos, two for the foreground and one for the background. The dynamic range was not that high, so I had no need for the other photos. I still could have done a better job, by taking another series for the rocks closes to the camera, as they are still a little out of focus, but maybe next time.
This is a manual blend form 3 shots, taken by Derwent Water near Keswick in United Kingdom.
I stopped by the Louvre while I was in Paris, but during the day, there were too many people for my style of photos (I don’t like having people in my photos :)). So I planed to return there later in the evening. And so I did. But between the bad weather and the whole area being closed off for filming, it wasn’t really a lucky day for me. So I got few photos, but nothing that spectacular. And here is one of them.
This is a manual blend from 4 shots.
Today I have for you another photo process post. Today it’s a nice panorama from Paris
The luminescence masks can looks quite interesting sometimes. So I inluded a Photoshop screenshot of a luminance mask, that also shows what editing steps I made after combining the shots into panorama (you can see how I combine shots here: https://www.hdrshooter.com/guides/combining-photos-for-hdr-panoramas/). As you can see, I used only few layers and no plugins. All done in Photoshop. Recently I tend to go the route of fewer modifications as possible
But to the screenshots. The layers are (from bottom up):
1: 0EV exposure as start
2: -2EV exposure for the sky
3 and 4: 0EV exposure from a second series where I held my hand in front of the sun, so I get no flares and I can blend that photo with the normal one + brightness modification for that layer
5 to 8: other exposures, to darken the sun and brighten the foreground, mostly manually painted masks
9 and 10: glow layer
11: added contrast to basic mid-tones
12: little bit of exposure to the dark’s
13: little bit of added saturation
14: high pass layer for more detail in the shot
15: a little bit of overall contrast
Not much sharpening here, as I do that after I re-size the photo.
Continue to the full post to see the original photos I used.
