Of course when I already got on top of the Durnstein castle ruins, I had to take as many photos as possible. I just know I wont go back there that soon. So here is another one from there.
This is a manual blend from 6 shots.
And another process for a shot for you. This time it’s a blue hour photo from Prague. So to get to this result:
I did the following steps in Photoshop (numbered from bottom up)
1. 0EV exposure used as base
2+3. -1EV and -2EV exposures used to darken the lights and castle
4+5. +1ev and +2EV exposures used to brighten the foreground and to merge the lights from the passing ship
6. added detail using a high-pass layer
7. added contrast to the basic mid-tones
8. used Color Efex Pro contrast to give more local contrast to the image
9. used Color Efex Detail extractor to add more details to the buildings
10+11. blurred layer used to add glow to the image
12. brightened the dark areas of the photo
13. darkened the mid-tones using levels a little, to recover contrast
Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV image.
Destination Prague
Tomorrow I’m again off to Prague, to my usual late summer trip there. This will be the third year I regularly go there. Once in spring and once in late summer. So again the next few days will be spend taking more and more photos there. These time I will also stop for a day in Dresden, so hopefully I also get few nice shots there :).
From high up
This is quite a simpler photo, but I really liked the view. It just looks so peaceful, such a nice place to live.
This is a manual blend from two shots. Taken from the top of the Aggstein ruins in Austria. This is probably the village Kofering, but I’m not completely sure, as it was zoomed in from far away.
To break away from the landscapes shots for a moment, today I have a night shot form Paris. It’s a little off center, but I just could not get to the center spot. There were too many people on the Traocadero, and the best spot was occupied by another photographer who was taking photos of that lovely red moon, which you can see to the left of the tower.
This is a manual blend from 4 shots. I’m sorry if the sky looks horrible. It looked so good as a 16bit file in Photoshop. But after exporting it, the colors created a horrible bending. I managed to correct that, but after uploading to Smugmug it created very ugly artifacts there and I haven’t found a way to remove those.
I like to plan my trips, so I always know where and when I will be and what I will be shooting (actually right now I’m planing my Prague and Dresden trip, which will start in few days :)). But on each trip, there are few spots that just appear and you have to take a photo. So was this. We were on the way to another castle when we passed this one and just had to stop. If only for a moment, for few photos :)
This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken by the Schonbuhel castle in Austria
