Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just few days away, and as it is the best time to buy new software, I thought I share with you some interesting deals I came across. So here is the first one. For the next few days Topaz Labs has discounted the whole Topaz plugins Collection almost by 50%. It’s really worth checking out. The amount of all the available effects here is just stunning. You can find them all on the Topaz Labs site.

5000 likes

My fan page on Facebook just reached 5000 likes. Thank you very much everyone who follows me there and I hope that over time there will be many more of you :)

Color therapy

Some time ago I was thinking, how would my photos looks without structure. I mean, when you do a B&W photo, you keep the structure, but remove the colors. So what if I removed the structure and kept the colors. I just wondered what I would get. And with a little playing around in Photoshop, I got this little series of very colorful minimalist images. It’s funny that even without any subject in them, I still get a similar feeling from them, as I did from the photos they were created from. The sunset, sky, grass colors are so unmistakable, that even on their own you feel like you see the objects :)

What do you think?

Cold evening by Danube

For today I chosen for you a photo I took two weeks ago by the SNP bridge in Bratislava. The water level at this time of the year is quite low, which really allows one to get down under the bridge, so getting also all these rocks into the shot. The light was not that great, but that is normal for this time of year. Hopefully it gets a little better, as I would so like to go out and get some new photos.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with original exposures in Photoshop.

Photography contest sponsored by Oloneo

The first week of my photography contest has passed and until now 90 entries have been posted overall. You still have one week to enter and have a chance to win a copy of Oloneo Photoengine. Just head over to the contest announcement here https://www.hdrshooter.com/2013/11/18/photo-contest-sponsored-by-oloneo/ and grab the source images.

And the raffle for another copy is also still running, so feel free to join there also, to have a bigger chance to win :)

The giveaway is over, the winners have been notified

At the party

I know I promised to get back to landscape shots today, but with the quantity of photos I still have to process from this weekend (three parties until the morning worth of photos :)), I just had no time for HDR. But instead, I have for you one of the photos I took during the party. And as I really like portraits, its a portrait.

This is a single image edited in Lighroom and Photoshop. I bounced the flash off the ceiling to get a nice light here.

Big thanks to Dominika for letting me share a photo of her :)

I’m just crazy busy this weekend, as I’m taking photos at the Bratislava Sensual Dance Festival (you can see them on my personal FB profile), so I had absolutely no time to edit photos. So for today I chosen another photo of the lovely Alexandra, which I edited few weeks ago. Will try to get back to the landscape shots on Monday :)

This is a single exposure edited in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Another week has passed, another process post is here. For today I chosen a little older photo, one from start of this year (as you can easily see by the snow in it :)). As I no longer have the PSD file of it (I started keeping them only few weeks after I edited this one) I will go more into the overall steps I took to get it. So here goes.

First of all the finished photo itself. You can see, it’s quite a huge panorama, with dimensions of 19649 x 5237 which makes this photo around 120Mpix.

You can view a zoomable version of this panorama in the Panorama section on this blog, or directly here.

I knew I wanted this photo fro a long time before I took it, as this is the best view of Bratislava. I was just missing the needed equipment. But sometime before I took it, I bought the Nodal Ninja 4 panoramic head. And with the help of it, I could make this pano without any problem. Here is the setup I was using:

So it was my Canon 5D mark II, with the Canon 16-35mm lens, wired remote, the bubble level all on the Nodal ninja 4 head.

Overall I took 8 shots, all 6 bracket series. I imported them all into Lightroom, where I did few minor corrections. First of all I enabled lens correction. This is very important when doing a panorama, as it removes the vignetting from the photo and so helps it to be blended more seamlessly. I also removed the chromatic aberrations and corrected white balance in Lightroom.

After that I exported all the 48 images as 16bit Tiff files and loaded them into PTgui. I merged them into a panorama and saved as their separate blended planes (check out my HDR panoramas tutorial for a more detailed explanation)

After that I used Bridge to load all the files into one Photoshop file as separate layers. You can do this also manually, file by file, but using Bridge is much faster.
In Photoshop I blended the images, and corrected the angle. As I said, I haven’t saved the file, so no screenshot here, but instead here is a piece of the panorama taken from the 50% zoom

and from a 100% zoom.

Continue to the full post to see two of the original 0EV exposures.

Today I was joined for a little evening photo-shooting by Marek Kijevský from Marek Kijevský photography and his lovely wife. To bad they visited Bratislava so late in the year, as it was quite cold and cloudy. I think we got some usable photos, but probably nothing spectacular. Same with the photo I’m sharing today. I really like the colors on the bridge and that you can see few of the stones under the water, but I’m still missing a better blue hour sky here. A dark blue would looks so nice. Still good to know that they changed the bulbs on the bridge. They all look white to the eye, but have a distinct color to the light they provide. It’s really something worth revisiting.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine from 7 exposures and the blended with original exposures in Photoshop.