I just had to take as many shots I could while having all the reflections from the puddles. And even with quite a huge amount of people walking around, I managed to get this without any of them in the shot. One has to like long night exposures :)

This is a HDR from 3 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 11, Middle exposure time: 15.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.856301, 2.297177

There is a lot of software one uses in photo editing, and in todays post, I will go through the ones that I use all the time, and will try to bring links to all the articles I posted over the last years about them into this one post :)

I will also put them in order in what I use them, and will include the alternatives that you can use, or that I use some of the time. There are of course more alternatives, but one can’t know everything :)

Additionaly, if you are interested to know, if you are able to install the respective software more than once with a single license, check out this article Can you install it more than once?

1. Lightroom

I can’t imagine starting with a different program than Lightroom. Over the years I tried few alternatives, but none of them can replace Lightroom in my opinion. It’s just so great for organizing, quick edits, edits on multiple photos and similar. It of course can be slower, but what can I expect when I have over 100 000 photos in my library. Still, if you are just starting with photo editing, this is the place to start. As the features are all in one place, you wont have to search for hidden stuff as in Photoshop. And with just few sliders, you can make your photo much nicer.

To make you start easier, here are few guides I wrote specially about Lightrom:
– Organizing the Lightroom catalog – how I organize my Lightroom catalog
– Quicker process in Lightroom – how to apply the most basic edits right by import
– 11 tips for Lightroom – 11 various tips for Lightroom
– 11 more tips for Lightroom – more various tips for lightroom
– HDR in Lightroom – how to edit 32bit files in Lightroom (a little side note, this guide needs an update, as you can now merge the files into a 32bitt file directly in Lightroom)

2. PhotoMe

This is a small tool that can be very helpfull sometimes. PhotoMe allows for the editing for RAW files exif data. This is needed if for instance you are doing a HDR bracket series panorama, and you made a mistake in one of the files exposures and now you can’t combine the shots. For more check out this post Editing the RAW exif data and you can download the program for free here.

3. PTgui

Third software I use regularly is PTgui. Of course I don’t use it all the time, only by panorammic shots. From my experience, it gives me the best results in combining shots into panoramas, while still supporting HDR brackets. I prefer it to others mostly for it just being more straight forward and easier to work with. Also the speed is a big plus.

For PTgui I posted these two articles:
– Few tips for PtGui – various tips how to make your work easier in PTGui
– Combining photos for HDR panoramas – how to make HDR panoramas in PTgui

You can find more about PTgui on their homepage ptgui.com and also get a trial version there.

The biggest alternative here is Autopano Giga. While it gives more fewatures and more options, it’s also more complicated and harder to start with. Of course both can create great results, but both work a bit differently.

For Autopano Giga I posted this guide HDR panoramas with Autopano on this blog. You can find more about it on their Kolor website.

4. Oloneo Photoengine

Next on the list is my HDR tone-mapping software of choice. Again I choose Photoengine, due to the quality of result, speed and ease of use. It’s perfect for beginners, as you really get most results just by sliding one slider (more on this in my Photoengine review). Realy the best place to start with HDR.

You can find the following articles on Photoengine on this blog:
– Few tips for Photoengine – various tips for Photoengine
– Batch process in Photoengine – how to batch process photos in Photoengine
– More detailed Photoengine workflow – my personal Photoengine workflow

For more info and a trial version, you should go to the Oloneo website.

The biggest alternative here is Photomatix Pro. It’s also a great HDR tonemapping software, but can be a bit harder in the beginning and can overwhelm you will all the sliders and features it supports. Still, with some practice, you can get really great results from it. Check out my review for more about it.

You can find my guide on how to use Photomatix pro as a part of my HDR tutorial here Combining and tonemapping your HDR photos and get more info and a trial version on Photomatix website.

5. Bridge

Bridge is more an addition to Photoshop, that some photographers use more as a Lightroom replacement, as it has some organization features. For me it’s more an entrance to Photoshop, as it allows to use multiple photos as input to Photoshop. Either its batch processing or loading files into layers, it just makes it easier.

6. Photoshop

Sooner or later you will just have to go with Photoshop. It just is the standard for photo editing. Especially if you start getting into layers and luminance masking. Not the easiest software to master, as it just has so many features, but with time you get the hang of it. You can check out the post about my beginnings in Photoshop for how I started.

For more check out these articles:
– How to use Photoshop masks – the basics of Photoshop masks
– Few tips for Photoshop – various tips for photoshop
– Loading exposures into Photoshop layers – how to load multiple exposures into photoshop
– Most useful blending modes in Photoshop – blending modes I find most useful when editing photos
– 11 my most used Photoshop shortcuts – what shortcuts I use the most

I looked around for a Photoshop alternative, but I don’t think any of them are on the same level. Still, you can check out Gimp, Afinity Photo or Photoline, if you want to try something else.

7. Nik Color Efex

Let’s continue with the plugins. The Nik Color Efex pro is the most used in my editing. It gives a huge range of filters and presets to edit your photos. It’s a part of the Nik Collection, and you can find out more in my review of Color Efex Efex (and you can find review of other parts on the Review page). It’s a little sad that after Nik was purchased by Google, it looks like all development stopped and there was no update in a very long time. Still, get it while you can (I don’t trust Google not getting rid of pro tools in favor of more amateur stuff). You can find it and more info about the Nik Collection on their page here.

You can also find Few tips for Color Efex Pro article on this blog.

The biggest alternative to Color Efex Pro is Topaz Adjust from Topaz. It also can be bought as a part of a bigger collection, or separately. Some of the filters it offers are very similar to the ones in Color Efex, but in my usage, it mostly fits better when you are going more for artistic edits, instead of realistic. You can check out my review of Topaz Adjust here, or have a look at their website for more information.

Another possible alternative is the Macphun Creative kit, but this, as the name states, is only if you are using a Mac computer. You can find information about that on the Macphun website.

8. Imagenomic Noiseware

So let’s continue with another plugin. This one, is my favorite to use to remove noise in my photos. There are of course many more ways how to do it but this is the one I’ve been using for years, and been very happy with it. You can read a bit more about it in my review or in the post Few tips about noise reduction. For more information, you can also visit the company website here.

There are many alternatives, and almost each plugin collection includes one. There is Dfine in the Nik collection, Noisless in Macphun Creative kit or Topaz DeNoise from Topaz. Most offer trial version, so you can easily try them all out and choose the one that best fits your work-flow.

9. TK actions

While not technically a software, I still thought I should mention it. TK actions are a set of Photoshop actions with their own panel, made by Tony Kuyper. There are very helpful if you are using luminance masking and other, quite advanced techniques of photo blending. They also include actions for web sharpening, which I’ve been using for all my photos for years. You can find much more about them on Tony Keuper web page here.

The biggest alternative here is the Raya Pro actions panel from Jimmy McIntiere, which while it provides most of the same features, does it a bit differently. You can find more about Raya Pro and other Jimmy’s tutorials on his web-page Shutter Evolve.

10. Caesium

Another of the small programs I use on every photo. Caesium is a program that can compress you images greatly, without loosing much of the quality. I don’t use it directly on the photos you see, but on stuff like embedded thumbnails, the big header and similar. So in places where I want the loading to be quicker and I don’t require the maximum quality. You can find more about it in this post How to quickly compress your photos and download it for free from the creators website.

One of the alternative is JPEGmini which provides very similar functions. You can find about it on JPEGmini website.

11. Picasa

The last software I use in photo editing is Picasa from Google. Not that I use the organization par of it, I just use the quick photo viewer. In my experience it has been the fastest photo viewer and I really like that that is the only thing it does. I don’t need any special function when just looking through image files. The only big downside is that it only sorts photos by date, so no change for going through them by name. You can download Picasa for free from their website here.

The most popular alternatives are either InfranView or AcdSee, but as I mentioned, both provide much more functions, which I don’t need, and it just makes them slower. But feel free to give them a try :)

And that’s all for this list. Sorry for it being a long post today, but there is really a lot of stuff. You can of course be using quite different software, and leave a comment if you have some great tips.

For today I went a chosen one of the older photos, from my trip to Dubai in 2013. I do really have to go back sometime :). This is a 2 shot panorama, each shot from 5 exposures. I had to do a little more editing here, as somehow I managed to cut off the top of one of the skyscrapers while taking the shots. But since I wanted it there, I had to use a part of a different photo, taken from the same spot, and also expand the sky (as described in this tutorial) to have a place for it.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2, Camera Model: Canon 5D mark II , Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 54mm, Aperture: 10, Middle exposure time: 1/80s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 25.071577, 55.132860

Really a long time passed since I posted a process post. But today, I will show you how I edited one of my recent photos from Paris, and of course also how it looked straight out of the camera. So let’s take a look.

If you looks at the start and the result, you can see where the problems were. The original photo is boring, does not include this yellow glow one wants when shooting into the sun, it’s too dark/bright in some areas, and there are lens flares. That all needed to be corrected.

 
For this I used three photos. I took more, but I had no need for the rest. The third photo, with my hand in it, is so I’m able to remove lens flares, and you can find all the info on that in the How to remove lens flares tutorial.

My first edits were in Lightroom. The biggest one was the change in white balance, to get this golden glow into the photo. I also removed chromatic aberrations here.

 
This done I exported all the files as 16-bit tiff files and loaded them into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. The brighter of the two exposures
2. Exposure with my hand in front of the sun. I used a brush to just pain in the bottom part of this photo, that I wanted to use.
3. Color balance. The photo was not golden enough, so I shifted the color until I had the result I wanted (in this case, I had to push all the midtones to around -25).
4. The darkest exposure, from which I painted in the sky.
5. I felt that the sky was still not dark enough, so I returned to Lightroom, underexposed the darkest exposure, exported again, and did the same as I did with the layer underneath.
6. Added linear contrast to the photo
7. Brightened the midtones of the photo with a curve.
8. I still wanted more color, so I used Color Efex Briliance & Warminth, to boost the yellows in the shot. Then I removed it from few areas, as I though it was too strong there.
9. The tower was fading a little into the sky, so I added more contrast to it, to make it more dominant.
10. It still needed a bit of color
11. I ended up with a little of Color Efex Pro contrast, to mostly get more definition in the foreground.

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:

I don’t really understand using negative space in photos that much. Maybe if I used it more I would get the hang of it more. But it’s probably not for me, even that I used it here. The evening I took this photo, the sky was a bit boring, with no clouds, so I tried a composition like this. And all the blue sky, with the contrast of the bright yellow parliament, looks quite interesting, doesn’t it? What do you think?

This is a blend of two exposures. I only used a darker exposure to darker few bright spots on the parliament.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 70mm, Aperture: 11, Middle exposure time: 6.0s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 47.498538, 19.041486