And we have Tuesday again, so it’s time for another process post. As every week I have for you one photo, where I will go through the editing process from start to finish. Btw. I still don’t know what to call these posts. Processing Tuesdays? Edit of the week? Andy suggestions? :)

So for today, I chosen this manual blend of a nice aerial view of Bratislava.

As always I started with Lightroom. For this one, I had to correct the white ballance, and do some perspective corrections, as I was pointing my camera down when I took this. In retrospect when looking at this photo, I could have done a better job cropping, as I haven’t noticed the ship in the bottom right at all before today.

After that I loaded all the exposures into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposureI
2+3. -1EV and -2EV to darken the lights of the city
4+5. +1EV and +2EV to brighten the shadows, mostly in the bottom right
6+7. added glow to the photo, this recovers some lost contrast and also boosts the colors (view my glow tutorial for details)
8+9. this is something I don’t do often but it helps in certain situations. I used the Color Efex Detail Extractor to add more detail and color to the photo. But as I liked the color on the whole image, but the detail only on part, I did the following. I duplicated the layer, set one to Luminosity (so it only affects the detail) and used masks to limit what it affects. Then I set the second one to color for the whole picture.
10. Added 0.5 exposure to the darkest parts of the image
11. Added a little saturation to the whole image

And that was all. Here you can see the original 0EV exposure, and to see the camera settings, please visit the original post here.

Because of the New years, I missed this weeks processing post. But to correct this, there will be one today. And from next week, it will get back to a processing post every Tuesday. So for today I chosen a photo from Paris, taken from the Tour Montparnasse.

So to get this photo, I as always started in Lightroom. I corrected the white balance and the crooked horizon. After that I exported all the files as 16bit Tiffs and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. There I only changed the strength, as that’s all I needed. Using Bridge, I then loaded all the files into layers in Photoshop. From there I did the following tweaks (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. 0EV exposure to recover the shadows using a hand-painted mask
3. -2EV exposure to darken the sky even more
4. Color Efex pro contrast, to get more local contrast in the image. Of course I removed the effect from the clouds
5. Color balance on the whole image, as it was too purple
6. High Pass sharpening
7. Added more contrast through a basic midtones mask
8. Desaturated the blue channel on the most saturated areas
9. A little more pro contrast, I felt like I need more detail in the city
10. Added contrast by using curves

And that was all. Please continue to the full post to see the 0EV exposure and the Oloneo result or to the original blog post to see the exif info for this image.

This week I moved the process post to Wednesday, as you know, it was Christmas yesterday :) And so I also thought I show you a photo with Christmas decorations in it. So to get to this final photo:

I started as always in Lightroom. I removed chromatic aberrations and lens distortion. After that I corrected the horizon, as it was not completely straight. Then I synced the settings to all of the brackets and exported them as 16-bit Tiff files.

My next step was to merge them into a HDR file in Oloneo Photoengine. I changed the TM Strengths to even out the exposure and then added a bit of contrast and adjusted the temperature of the image. I saved the result as another 16-bit Tiff file.

I continued by loading the Photoengine result and the original files into layers in Photoshop (by using Bridge to load them). Once there I did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3. 0EV exposure brightened by one stop and then used to remove a moving person from the photo
4. +1EV to correct ghosting in few areas
5+6. +2EV exposure darkened by 1 stop and then used to remove more ghosting
7. merged the first layers and removed multiple persons from the photo using content aware and other retouching tools. I also removed all the dust spots that were visible.
8. used 0EV exposure with a brights luminosity mas to brighten the tree
9. Color Efex Pro contrast to recover photo contrast lost in HDR blending.
10. Noise reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
11. Color Efex Darken/Lighten center, to create a vignette effect.
12. Curves used to darken few parts of the corners, that were still too bright
13. Added more exposure to most of the image to brighten it up. The additional brightness was not applied to the brightest parts of the image.
14. Brightened the extreme dark areas of the photo
15. Used curves to add more contrast to the tree

I also used the Perspective Crop tool, to correct the distortion of the photo, as the tree was falling in the original one.

Please continue to the full post to see the oringinal 0EV exposure and the Oloneo Photoengine result. Or you can continue to the photo post, to see the camera info and where this photo was taken.

And another week has passed, and almost another year. It feels like only yesterday I added my first processing post to the blog. And there are already so many of them. But another Tuesday, another one for you.

For today I chosen this very foggy photo from Prague, taken late at night. I used multiple applications to edit it, and I will show you all the steps I took in them. So to get this final photo, I took the following steps:

As always I started with Lightroom. I corrected the horizon line, lens distortions, chromatic aberrations and added a little noise reduction. After that I exported all the files as 16-bit tiff files.

I opened them all in Oloneo Photoengine, where only with changing the TM strength, I got this result. My next step was to load all the original files, together with the HDR into Photoshop for further edits.

In Photoshop I did the following (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo result
2+3. I brightened the water in the 0EV exposure and blended it into the HDR photos.
4. -2EV exposure to darken few bright spots
5. A little bit of Color Efex pro contrat, to add more detail
6+7. Added more glow to the photo
8. Color Efex Darken/Lighten center to add a vignette
9. Brightened the darkest areas of the photo
10. Overall color balance, -15 in all channels
11. In this layer I removed all the people that were on the bridge
12. Added more contrast to the basic midtones
13. High pass sharpening
14. Used Color Efex tonal contrast to add more detail to the bridge

Btw. You can find my review of Color Efex here.

And that’s all. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV shot, or to the original post to see the camera info. Feel free to ask any questions and to share this post (or any other) further :)

Wow.. how quickly the week has passed again. With all the stuff around the contest and the new newsletter, it was over in a second. But again we are at a Tuesday, so we are at another process post.

For today I chosen for you a photo from Maribor, Slovania. As you will see the original photo had quite a good exposure already, so I only had to correct few things to make it a little more interesting.

So to get to this photo:

I started as I always do, with few tweaks in Lightroom. I corrected the horizon, so it’s nice and leveled. Then I corrected the white balance, removed lens distortions and chromatic aberrations and added a little noise reduction.

After that I loaded all the files into Photoshop and did the following adjustments (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposure to start with
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and lights in the photo
3. -2EV exposure to darken the brightest lights
4. +1EV exposure to brighten the bridge
5. +2EV exposure to brighten the bridge even more
6. Color efex Pro contrast to correct the colors and add more local contrst
7+8. Added glow to the photo (view my tutorial on this)
9. Brightened the shadow dark’s as I felt the bridge was still too dark.
10. Sharpened the photo using high pass filtering

And that’s all for this photo. Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.