Sphere in Nursultan

Still raining today, so let’s continue with another photo from a rainy evening. Even if again you will not see the rain in the photo.

This one is from the Expo Sphere building in Astana, or better said Nur-sultan. This is because the name of the Kazakhstan capital city Astana was changed about 3 weeks ago. So now it’s Nur-sultan (I seen it being written as Nursultan and Nur-sultan, so not sure which one is right). Probably the first time I ever been in a city which changed it’s name. Does not happen that often.

This is a three shot blend, all done in Photoshop.

The shiny silver Red Bull B-25J

I was quite lucky to go to the Botanical garden yesterday. The forecast for the rest of the week was rain, and they were right. It was raining the whole day today in Bratislava. Not really fit for nature photography. But to keep to the topic, here is a photo I took during a rainy day like today.

I visited Salzburg in Austria multiple times already. But I have yet to post a photo from there. The reason is, I have none. I have been there in the Summer and also in Winter. And each time, it rained. It rained heavily. So no photos were taken. But on my first visit few years back, since it was raining, we vent to the Red Bull museum there. It’s full of beautiful cars, helicopters and planes.

There were quite a few people inside, but since they allowed for tripods (not sure if it’s still like that), I decided to try to take some photos. And after few tries, I even managed one without any people in it. Ok, to be completely honest, there were some legs visible in the back, but those I could remove easily in Photoshop.

In this photo is the shiny silver Red Bull B-25J Mitchell World War 2 bomber that was displayed right in the middle of the museum. It makes for a bit of a busy photo, as the plane blends with the background, but I like it. It silver, so it reflects everything anyway. It’s a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

If you want to visit the museum, it’s called Hangar 7 and here is it’s location on Google maps.

Spring colors

When I started this blog, I sued to do a post with nature photos every spring. But over time I stooped. Spring was very busy for me the last few years. But this year I have a bit of time, so I got back to it. Hope you like the change from my usual shots.

All these photos were taken handheld and are single exposures. All edited in Lightroom, then sharpened for web in Photoshop.

Using levels to brighten a photo

So what I do, is to create a selection of only the shadow areas in a photo and then add contrast and brightness to those. I don’t want to change anything with the bright areas of the photo, just the dark ones. One has to:

1. Open a photo one wants to edit
2. Go into the Channels window. If you don’t see it, you can turn it on under Window/Channels
3. In this window, hold down Ctrl and click on the RGB channel. This will select all the bright areas in a photo and you will see the selection marching ants on your image.

4. Now, we need to inverse this selection, so instead of the bright areas it selects the dark ones. Hit Ctrl+Shift+I (or Select/Inverse from the menu). The selection will change to the inverse one.
5. Go back to the layers window. Choose Create new Adjustment layer in the bottom right (circle icon that is half white, half black) and from the menu choose levels.

6. A new levels layer will be added with a mask already applied to it. In the levels window, you will see, that the histogram is towards the left and not the right. That means no highlights are select and will not be modified.
7. To add brightness, start dragging the white triangle on the right side of the histogram to the left. Until it touches the histogram, you are no overexposing any parts of the photo, so you can safely move it as much as you need.
8. To add contrast, move the middle triangle to right. I would not overdo this, usually staying between 1.0 and 0.9 works best.

You can repeat this process multiple times, as after each edit, the selection changes. If you are getting very saturated colors afterwards, you can just change the blending mode of the layer to Luminosity and then it will have no effect on the color saturation at all. Yo can also use this only on part of your image, depending on what you need.

One can get a similar result by using Curves or the Brightness/Contrast adjustments. Mostly depends on which one are you most comfortable to use.

And here are few before/after comparisons. The changes are subtle, but noticeable. Maybe a bit harder with the photos next to each other, but much more when you can flip between the two versions in Photoshop. Most editing is just these subtle changes used multiple times.

At the edge of Business bay in Dubai

A bit of a random photo from the Business bay in Dubai. I took many photos there, but also wanted some with the bridges in the area. But it was also already quite late at night and I have been up since 4am that day. And the heat really did not help with not being dead tired. So I got few shots and packed for the day. Still it came out quite nice.

This is a three exposure blend done completely in Photoshop. This is not a panorama, I cropped the photo to this aspect ration. I used the 12mm Laowa lens here, and while it captured a lot in the shot, it also meant I got a lot of the water, more then I wanted. So I cropped it out of the photo. Cityscapes usually look better as panoramic shots anyway. I also used the Nisi Natural Night filter in this photo. I don’t use it all the time, but I quite like the results I got in my Dubai photos. It really depends on the lights that are in the scene, if it’s worth it or not.