Since I posted so many fireworks photos this last few weeks, I chosen one also for todays process post, to show you how it was edited. So this is of course one of the photo from the New Years fireworks. So here goes.

Finished photo

Original photo

This was of course an edit from a single RAW file. I started in Lightroom, where I first removed the perspective distortion, toned down the highlights and removed chromatic aberrations. From there I exported two version, one normal and one underexposed by one stop.

1st export

2nd export

I loaded the first export into Oloneo Photoengine, where by changing the strength and contrast, I created a base for my further edits. Then I loaded it, and the two Lightroom exports into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up).
1. Oloneo Photoengine result.
2. The brighter Lightroom export, to brighten the ship and the corners.
3. Darker Lightroom export to darken the center explosion.
4. Merged layer on which I removed dust spots and filled in the corners.
5. Color efex tonal contrast to add more contrast to the explosions.
6. Imagenomic noiseware to remove noise form the sky.
7. Added overall contrast.
8. Recovered the shadows a little from the Photoengine result.
9. Selective contrast to few more spots.
10. Small de-saturation of the red color.
11. The colors were still to strong here, so I used a copy of the Photoengine result, set to color and just softly brushed over few spots.
12. Brightened the center a little, as it looked too gray after the edits.

Oloneo edit

Photoshop edit

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:

On Wednesday I posted a guide on how to create a reflection in Photoshop, but I never posted just the finished photo. So here it is today, and if you want to try and create it yourself, you can find the guide here.

Been a while since I updated the wallpapers page, so I’m doing it today. This time I added three new wallpapers taken all in Zermatt in Switzerland. As always, there are all available in 1920×1200 and 1600×1200, and you can get them from the wallpapers page.

You all seen the photos where everything looks like it is falling. Perceptive distortion is one of the most common problems in photos and there are multiple ways to remove it. So today I will show you one simple way in Photoshop.

How to avoid perspective distortion

But before I start, here is how you can avoid it. Perspective distortion appears when your camera is not perfectly leveled. It not only has to be leveled from left to right, but also from front to back. If you have this, your photos will have absolutely no perspective distortion in them.
Some of the newer cameras have a leveling function directly in them, and you just have to turn it on so you see if your camera is leveled correctly. If you don’t have this function, get yourself a 3-axis bubble level for the flash hot-shoe and use that.

Correcting perspective distortion in Photoshop

Let’s look at one of my recent photos. This is from the New years fireworks. I wanted to catch the whole explosion, but as I was standing quite close I could not have the camera leveled and still get it. So I ended up with this distorted image. So the steps to correct this were:

1. Loaded image into Photoshop
2. Unlocked the background layer, so I can edit it. Just double click on the layer, and in the pop-up choose OK. You can also create a duplicate layer instead.

1. starting photo

2. unlock layer

3. Hit Ctrl+T to enter Free transform. When the selection appears, right click inside it and choose Perspective.
4. Now to correct the distortion, you have to drag one of the top corners to the side, until the vertical lines are at 90 degree angle to the horizon.

3. enter free transform

4. change perspective

5. You can see that with this correction, everything looks a bit squished and strange. So this still has to be corrected. So right click again inside the selection and choose Scale.
6. Now we can again scale the image, so by dragging the top center point we can stretch the image up, until it looks good. On some images this can be also the bottom, depends on the content you don’t mind cropping off. Here I cropped of from the sky.

5. change back to scale

6. scale image

7. Once you are done, just hit enter, and you have a corrected image.

This works fine with images with a little distortion, but if you have much more, it will just not look good corrected. It’s just look too stretched afterwards. So think before you take a photo, that you have no or only a little distortion to correct.

The weather does not really like me. Each time I stay at home, the sunset is just stunning. The moment I step out of the flat with my camera, it’s absolutely boring and uninteresting. Probably the only solution would be to move somewhere from where I have a great view, so I can shoot directly from the flat :) Same happened today, when I stopped by the Slavin war memorial, but ended with only few photos. Right when I got there a strong wind started, and since I was using a 200mm lens, it shaked the camera like crazy. That’s also why todays photo is only from one exposure.

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