And we arrived at another Monday, and you know what that means :) Another process post. For today I chosen this manually blended night photo from Dubai, so let’s get to it.

Finished photo

0EV exposure

As you can see, the most edits were to correct the color and brightness of the photo. There were also few changing lights, that I wanted to capture in the shot. I took 7 exposures here, just to be sure. I did not know how dark I have to go to get a good looking moon in the photo, and in the end I haven’t used them all anyway.

All exposures

Lightroom tweaks

I started in Lightroom. As I wanted to do very few edits, as I wanted to avoid color banding as much as possible, I did quite a few edits already in Lightroom. I opened the shadows, darkened the highlights, added contrast and exposure. I also corrected the horizon line and changed the white balance. From there I loaded the exposures into Photoshop and continued from there (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. -1EV exposure, from which I started
2. Complete sky replaced from the -2EV exposure
3. -3EV from where I darkened few bright lights
4. 0EV to get back some of the highlights
5. Merged copy, as I wanted to retouch out the wheel on the right side
6. Little recovery, of the rotating wheel on the right, as I didn’t like the blended version
7. More contrast to the top part of the image
8. More contrast to the whole image
9. Little more overall saturation
10. And a little bit more contrast once more

Here you can see the screen shot from Photoshop, and you will notice a huge amount of color banding in it. But if you read my post Dealing with color banding few days ago, you know why it is so. Once I merged the layers, the banding disappeared :)

 
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:

Of course this reflection is not real. The sea is just not calm enough there to create it. Still one can imagine how it would maybe look like :) With a little help of Photoshop that is. I actually chosen to do this, because I still have some  photos of the Burj Al Arab, but they were all similar to the ones I already posted. So I thought I do something different with one of them :)

This is a HDR form 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, mirrored in Photoshop.

As winter came and went again (it snowed for a whole evening) I still don’t have any new winter photos. And I so wanted to have a little more snow here. But since there is none, I looked through my old photos to find some. And here is one, taken two years ago, high up in the High Tatras. This was taken from the Lomnicky peak, which is 2634 meters over the sea level.

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

One of the more common problems with landscape photos, is color banding. It’s a very noticeable problem, that can give a photo a very ugly look. But there is actually a quite simple solution to this, to remove it, or at least make it less visible.

What is Color banding?

Each time you have a smooth transition between two colors in a scene, mostly in the blue shades of a sky, it can happen that in a photo of it, you will get these steps where you can see where one color changes into another, instead of a smooth transition.

This is due to a limited number of colors one can save in a photo file. Like this, the nearest available color is used and abrupt changes between shades of the same color are created. So the more colors, the less likely this will happen. If you ever edited a photo in 16bit mode, and then tried to save it as a 8bit file to web, you would find this problem rather often.

Here you have a typical scene for color bending. Even in this corrected version, you still can see a little of it due to the compression.

How to avoid color banding?

• Use bigger color space – The more colors available, the less color banding. This is of course not possible if you share to web, as browsers don’t work correctly with 16-bit files.
• Use smaller compression – The more a photo is compressed, the less colors it uses, the more visible the bending is. Of course if you upload to a service that does it’s own compression (like Facebook), you have very little power over this.
• Avoid noise reduction – Noise reduction is similar to lower quality, where it averages the colors so more banding is introduced.
• Avoid edits – The more filters or adjustments you put on a photo, the more you run into a chance to create more banding. Especially edits that add contrast tend to introduce more color banding.
• Avoid removing lens distortion – Especially in the sky, it can create unwanted color banding.
• Merge first – This is one Photoshop specific. When you put your adjustments into separate layers and then look at a photo, it may look like there is a huge amount of color banding. But this could be misleading. Before you try and correct it, try merging the layers into one (or create new layer from the merge). You will quickly see, that once all the adjustments are applied, the banding becomes much less dominant, or it disappears completely.

How to correct color banding?

So what to do once the banding is there? The solution is to add more variation to the color transition, so forcing the compress algorithm to use more colors and so creating a nicer transition. To do this, one has to add a little noise to the effected areas.

You can use the basic noise filter in Photoshop. Just go under Filter/Noise/Add noise. The settings you need are not always the same, as it depends a lot on the photo, but mine are usually 0.3%, Gaussian and Monochromatic. You can experiment with the strength, to see if you need more or less. I would suggest adding the noise to a new layer, a merged copy of the whole image, and then just masking in the parts where you need it.

Here is an example of a correction like this, before and after adding noise. Please note that even the screen-shots are influenced by image compression so the effect is not 100% as seen here.

No noise added

Noise added

If you have any questions or a great different solution how to remove color banding, feel free to share in the comments.

I thought about going out to take some snow shots, but the weather is just crazy recently. In the evening, the snow is there, and it’s gone again in the morning. The next day it snows again, but it dissapers again very quickly. It’s like all 4 season every two day. So until the weather decides what it wants to be, here is one photo from last year, when there was winter at least for few days in a row :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo photoengine, finished in Photoshop.