Of course while in Budapest I took also few other photos, not just the firework ones. But thanks to the weather I was not able to take many, as it was raining a lot. But luckily, few hours before the fireworks, it stopped raining, and started only few hours after. Usually I have worse luck with weather, so it was nice for a change :)

So for today, I have for you a photo of the Margareth bridge. I managed to stop by it the only evening I had. It’s one of those bridges, that are just so horrible to edit in photos. Yellow lights combined with a yellow bridge, just make for a bad combination. But it still looks nice :)

This is a manual blend from 5 exposures, combined with a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine.

As you probably expected, another fireworks photo for today. I have taken quite a few I want to edit and share with you :) The fireworks this year in Budapest were really stunning, and I think quite different that the ones from last year. They just were a little problematic to capture in photos, as they created a lot of smoke, and were not consistent. What I mean, they changed a lot between very bright and not so bright explosions. So I had to change the camera settings very often, and it was very hard to get a nice exposure. But luckily, the RAW files can get a lot of info, and can correct for a lot :)

Same with this photo. It would be probably better with a little shorter exposure time, as it ended up being quite busy, but I still like it. It’s a single exposure edited in Lightroom, Oloneo Photoengine and Photoshop.

I’m also including a behind the scenes photo, so you can see where I was standing while taking this. It was actually in the middle of a hill, so I had to be very careful not to just roll down :)

So I’m back home from Budapest, and despite it raining around half of the time I was there, I think I got few nice shots. Of course the reason I went there this time were the St. Stephens day celebrations, which are always finished with huge fireworks. This time I wanted to get a little different view than last time, but I stupidly chosen a bad spot, from which I could not see most of them. So I quickly (very quickly :) ) searched for a new spot during the fireworks, and I think I found one that was quite alright. You can judge by yourself from the today’s photo.

This is a single exposure edited in Lightroom, Oloneo Photoengine and Photoshop.

Yesterday I posted a photo from a very sunny day, so how about today a shot from a very cloudy day :) This one is from Budapest and I’m actually stopping this week there, as on the 20th it’s again the St. Stephens day, and there will again be huge fireworks above the city. So of course, great opportunity to get some nice photos :) If all goes well, you should see them by the end of next week.

This is a HDR from 3 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine. The photo was taken through a Hoay ND 400 filter.

Is it really another Monday already? Looks like it is. So as almost every Monday, let’s take a look at one of my photos and how it was edited. For today I will show you this interior shot, taken in the church of the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary.

So let’s first look at the final, and the starting image. As you can see, the dynamic range of the scene was quite high, from the very bright window in the back to the dark shadows around the corners. This all needed to be corrected into a dynamic range, that can be show in one photo.

 
I took 6 shots here, as I wanted a -3EV for the window. As always I started with Lightroom, where I removed lens distortions, chromatic abberations, and corrected the horizon line. I then exported all the files as 16-bit tiffs to be used in Oloneo Photoengine.

 
Here you can see the files in Oloneo Photoengine, and the result of Photoengine edit. If you would like to try this yourself, you can. Just go here to download the files (all six 16-tiff brackets I used, just resided to 2000 px wide versions) and you can get the trial of Oloneo Photoengine here.

 
I only changed the strength and contrast in Oloneo Photoengine, and maybe a little warmer white balance. From there I loaded the result into Photoshop, and I haven’t even added any of the original files, as I seen no need for them. Then I did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result.
2. A copy of the first layer, on which I used warp to change the left side, so it more matches the right side.
3. Color Efex Detail Extractor to get more detail in the photo.
4. Imagenomic Noiseweare to remove noise from the photo
5. Color balance to make the highlight a little more warmer.
6+7. Added glow to the photo, just removed it with a brush from few areas, that were too saturated afterwards.
8. The light areas were to colorless for me, so with a soft brush, with orange color I painted them using a layer set to soft-light.
9. Color balance once more, as I felt the photo is still to purple.
10. I still wasn’t satisfied with the symmetry at the end, so once more I used warp to correct the photo even more. That’s what happens when one needs to take photos in a hurry and does not center the camera properly :)

 
And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here: