HDRshooter

Budapest, Hungary

The center of Budapest

April 4, 2021 No Comments

First edited on the MacBook

So this is the first photo I edited completely on the Macbook Pro M1. I did still use the non-M1 version of Photoshop, as there is no way to get custom plugins to work in the new one. I just can’t work without Raya Pro anymore. But surprisingly, I could no see a real performance difference between this and my old desktop which I used to edit before (i7, 32GB RAM, SSD drive, 1080 GTX). Maybe just that Photoshop opens a bit slower, but I think that’s due to it being a non-native program. The laptop is not warm, and I have not heard the fan. That’s quite impressive with a photo of this size.

Still, I’m not yet used to it, especially the shortcuts give me issues. I already switched Control and Command keys, but that only helps partially. Will take a while to get completely used to things.

The center of Budapest

I started with a panorama to check the performance. This one, from the center of Budapest, is a two-shot panorama each shot from 5 exposures. Both first blended together, and the photo merged into a panorama and finished.

Here are few details from this photo, as it’s hard to see in these big panoramas.

And for those that would like this one as wallpaper, here is a version in 5120×1440 for super ultra-wide monitors with 32:9 aspect.

France, Paris

Sparkling tower in the night

March 22, 2021 No Comments

New Laptop

Last week I got a new laptop, the Macbook Pro 13 M1, and I have to say, it’s really hard to relearn years of muscle memory. As I no longer remember most Photoshop shortcuts and just do them automatically, I can’t select almost anything on the mac without looking. It’s just so strange. But luckily one gets used to new things rather quickly, so I will see how it is in a week or two. But that the M1 Photoshop does not support extensions is a much bigger issue. One has a new processor but has to use an older software version just to get the whole functionality. Sometimes I don’t understand Adobe’s approach at all.

Today’s photo is not yet edited on the mac, but the next one probably will be.

Sparkling tower in the night

This photo is a bit darker for my style, but I wanted the Eiffel tower to stand out here. And with the surroundings not being so interesting anyway. This is of course not a new photo, as I don’t have any. It was one of those still taken while I used the Sony a7R. It’s a two-shot vertorama, each shot split into two and then merged back together in Photoshop.

AI-generated wallpapers

February 23, 2021 No Comments

AI generated wallpapers

I tried out to create AI-generated images, and after some tries, it became really addictive. Really fun for someone who can’t really paint to create something that one could only imagine before. And since I like them quite a lot, I thought I share some with you, in nice big resolutions, fit for use as wallpapers.

Don’t forget to check out other available wallpapers:

4K wallpapers – Single Screen – Surface, 21:9 and dual-screen – Super ultra-wide – Mobile – AI-generated

How were they created?

For all these AI-generated images, I used Midjourney v4, with different prompts. For instance one like:

solitary figure in steampunk diving suite, looking up an impossibly large Lovecraftian monster with tentacles, in a giant underwater cave, glowing walls, eldritch horror, hyper-realistic

Then I used Topaz Gigapixel to get a higher resolution and to clean them up. After that, I finished them up in Photoshop with a few final tweaks.

Mobile wallpapers

I created quite a few that are very suitable for mobile phone wallpapers, all 1:2 aspect ratio, 2000x4000px. Should be good enough for almost all phones available. They especially look good on OLED screens. Since there are quite a lot of them, I decided not to post them directly here, but in a separate gallery on my portfolio page. You can find them here.

21:9 AI-generated wallpapers

These are also mostly Lovecraft and steampunk inspired, as I have been reading many such books lately :). All in 3440×1440 resolution, suitable for ultrawide 34-inch monitors.

4K AI-generated wallpapers

And these are all in 3840×2160, exactly for a 4K monitor.

Articles, Misc

Winter in Super ultra wide

January 6, 2021 No Comments

New Year

I would prefer to start the new year as always with a fireworks shot, but no, there were no fireworks this year in Bratislava. So no luck there. So to start with, here are two new super ultra-wide wallpapers, both with the city covered in snow. But not that you think that there is some snow here right now. Just rain. These are older photos.

Btw. I have not done a My favorite photos from 2020 post, as there was just nothing to choose from.

Don’t forget to check out other available wallpapers:

4K wallpapers – Single Screen – Surface, 21:9 and dual-screen – Super ultra-wide – Mobile wallpapers

Winter in Super ultra wide

And here are the two new wallpapers, as always available in 5120×1440 px.

Czech republic, Prague

Foggy night at the Charles bridge

November 22, 2020 No Comments

Blog

I’m happy to see that the number of visitors to this blog is going up, even when I did not update that much this year. Especially the super ultra-wide wallpapers are getting the most visits every day. It has just been such a strange year. But that’s the same for everyone. Hopefully, next year is more normal than this one.

Foggy night at the Charles bridge

It has been a while since I edited a photo and this one is not really an easy one. Fog likes to create a lot of color banding in photos, and it was the same in the sky with this one. I had to add a huge amount of noise into the sky to get rid of most of it, but I feel like there is still a bit there. But I did not want to add more. If you want to know more about this, check out my guide on removing color banding here.

In this photo the Charles bridge in Prague, with a very large number of birds around it. Yes, every dot on the water is a bird, and there were even more there. Taken already in 2018, during an early spring trip there.

This is a single exposure, broken up into two and then blended back together.

Foggy night at the Charles bridge, Prague