I stooped today at a motorbike exhibition in Bratislava. And while I managed to stay there only for about an hour (the number of people there was just to big for my comfort), I did take a few photos. And here are a few of them :)

All taken hand-held, and with a 24-70 or 16-35 lens.

As I post photos, from time to time I get questions, asking if this or that thing in them is real. Better said, if I got something because it was really there, or by camera settings or just in Photoshop. And to clarify my point of view on this, here is this post.

I think, every photographer has a line, to what edits he/she is willing to perform on a photo, while still calling it a photo. Anything after this, I would already call a photo-manipulation. This line is quite different for everyone, and also quite different based on what are the photos used for.

I edit my photos quite a lot, as it’s quite obvious from this site. But I try to stay away from photo manipulations, or if I do some, I clearly mark it it the description, that a part of the photo is not real.

So what I will edit in a photo:

1. I will remove camera issues, distortion, aberrations, noise, flares and similar
2. I will remove myself from the photo, stuff like random shadows, or forgot to move my bag and similar
3. I will remove people, cars, scaffolding, cranes and trash. All this I find very distracting and already try to avoid them when composing a photo. But as everyone knows, sometimes cropping them out will make the photo worse
4. I will play with brightness, color and sharpness of a photo. This are actually all the things you change in HDR post-processing
5. sometimes I also remove identifiable markers, like license plates on cars, or copyrighted signs

And then there are things I don’t do, or if I do them I clearly state that they have been done:

1. fake reflection. If I remember correctly, in the last 5 years, I posted 4 photos with a fake reflection. Still, they all probably had fake in their name :)
2. fake light effects, flares, light stars and similar
3. paste in a star sky. If I can’t get a photo of the stars from a certain spot, I won’t create one.
4. paste in sun, moon, rainbow, people, objects or anything else
5. combining photos from different locations into one

Then there is also a question about the sky in landscape photos. I don’t mind when someone replaces a sky in their photo, I just don’t do it. I know how to do it, I done it few times, but never posted the result. The reason is that the photo just looks so fake to me afterwards, that I can’t get over it. I just know that it’s not what I have seen.

That’s actually also how I limit my edits. If a photo starts to feel fake to me, I know I have to undo and tone down the edits I did on it.

Btw. I’m not saying I don’t like photo manipulations. I like them, and there are many photographers who create wonders with them. I just like to know, when I’m looking at a photo, if its a photo or a photo manipulation. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell :)

What are you thought? Where is your line?

I haven’t posted a panorama in such a long time, so here is one. It was taken a little after I took the last photo I posted. It’s really nice to edit such a photo on a huge screen. You just see so much more, and can get a nice perspective on how the photo looks. Too bad, that when you look at it on something small afterwards, it’s never so great. It’s actually a problem with most HDR photos. They are so detailed, that seeing them small, you never see everything. So for todays photo, you can go here to see it bigger than the usual size I share my photos in :)

This is a three shot panorama, each one from 5 exposures, combined in PTGUI, Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 3×5, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 70-200mm F2.8 IS II, Focal length: 100mm, Aperture: 8, Middle exposure time: 2s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.134279,17.106281

If you looked at my photos, you would notice that I use Photoengine quite a lot. Over the last few years, it became one of the main tools that I use. And each time I post a process post, I also mention that I used Photoengine to blend the photos and I only tweaked few settings. To make this a little more elaborate, today I will go more into this, and show you my exact process of how I work with Photoengine.

Always before I get into Photoengine, I correct few things in Lightroom. Lens distortions and chromatic aberrations are the ones I correct the most, but from time to time I also correct the white balance. One can of course do this also in Photoengine, but doing that will make it harder to blend in parts of the original exposures back into the photo.

Thats why I always use 16-bit tiff files as Photoengine input, as I want all these tweaks already be included. Then I select what files to use. If a series is exposed properly in the middle, the Photoengine result will nicely exposed from the start. But if you include some very bright, or very dark exposures, the base will be either too bright or too dark, and you then have to spend longer time tweaking the settings to get a good result. Much easier to just leave those exposures out, and correct possible over or underexposed areas later.

If there was wind while I took the exposures, I turn on Auto Align. I don’t use the ghost removal as it can result in strange artifacts around the photo, and it makes it just harder to correct later, as it just not even enough.

Once in the HDR tonemaping, I start with changing the strength, usually to something around 40-60. Almost never more. You will see, that when you move the slider, first the shadows will get brighter, and after a certain point, the bright areas will become darker. I would stay lower from this point, and just leave the bright areas as they are. Making them darker, will just make the photo more unrealistic, and creates ugly borders around the dark areas.

You will notice that this will also remove all of the contrast from the photo. So the second thing I change, is the first contrast slider. It’s hard to say exactly how much, but if I see that I’m gong very high, and still don’t have enough contrast, I add a little Low dynamic tone contrast. That one usually adds more contrast more quickly.

Sometimes this will make the photo look a little dark, and that can be easily corrected with fine exposure. The last step I do is to check what effect the Natural HDR mode has, if I like the colors more with it on or off. Sometimes I even save both versions, and then blend them together in Photoshop. This is when I like some areas from one with it on, and some areas from one with it off.

And that’s all. From here I save the file as a 16-bit tiff, and continue in Photoshop. Feel free to ask any questions about this in the comments.

This post comes a little later that I wanted, but unluckily, while I was out shooting yesterday, my system HDD decided to die, and I ended up with an nonfunctional PC. But after buying a new HDD today, I managed to get it all up and running again, and can get back to photos :)

Yesterday I had the possibility to shoot from a new location in Bratislava, and to get a new view of the city center. It’s a very nice view, as you can see the three most dominant building in Bratislava (if you don’t count all the new skyscrapers :)). From left, it’s the Bratislava Castle, the SNP bridge and the St. Martins cathedral.

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 4, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 51mm, Aperture: 8, Middle exposure time: 8s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.134279,17.106281