Today, I will show you how I edited this late night photo from Dubai. This is of course the Burj Khalifa, as seen with a long lens from the Palm Jumeirah. So let’s start.

Here you have the final photo and the original 0EV exposure. As you can see, it was really missing a lot of contrast. I also wanted to get more detail, make the buildings in the background more visible, and mostly, tweak the color, so it fit more with the strong neon color of the top of the Burj Khalifa.

Finished photo

Original 0EV

As always I started in Lightroom. I removed lens distortion, vignetting, and tweaked the tint, so it’s more purple. Then I exported all the exposures as 16-bit tiff files.

All exposures in Lightroom 

Lightroom tweaks

After that, I loaded all the exposures into Oloneo Photoengine, and added strength and contrast. I then loaded the result into Photoshop together with all the original exposures. The edits I did there were the following (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. Color efex pro contrast, but only on the buildings, as I wanted more local contrast just there.
3. A little overall contrast
4+5. More contrast to the brightest areas. I put the layer in a group with its own layer mask, as I wanted the effect just in few areas.
6. During the edit I decided that I want the whole photo purple, so I blended few parts from the -2EV exposure to change few lights.
7. Just a merged copy I forgot to remove :)
8. Color efex Darken/lighten center, to add a vignette back.
9. TK Actions vibrance mask, to tone down the most saturated colors
10. A little more overall contrast

Oloneo Photoengine

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:

I had one more photo of the lovely Alexandra ready, and since I still feel sick today, and not in the mood for any editing, that is what I’m posting :)

But so the post today is not just so short, I’m including a screenshot from Lightroom, of how this photo looked straight out of the camera. I did most of the edits directly in Lightroom, like adding exposure, opening up the shadows, changing the white balance to get a warmer tone and similar. I left for Photoshop only the more specific tweaks, like making the eyes brighter, sharpening and adding a vignette.

As every All saint’s day, I’m posting a new photo from a nearby cemetery today. The tradition to light candles during this day, just creates such a stunning scene. But I took only few photos this year, as I was there only for a short while. I still sick and not feeling very well, and I have the feeling I will pay for going out into the cold.

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

HDRshooter comunity

Maybe some of you have already noticed, the small addition of a spot in the bottom left of the blog. This is a new way you can interact with me, the blog, and also with each other. This is the new HDRshooter community :). Feel free to comment on the blog, post questions, links, your photos, what ever you want, just with few rules: no spaming, no trolling, no NSFW content, keep it civilized :)

When you have the spot opened you can not only join the chat, but if you click on Whats popular you can see the currently most popular posts and pages on the blog. So feel free to give it a try :)

Brackets to play with

And to give it a little push for the start, here you have the brackets from one of my photos. You can edit them in any way you like and share your result in the community chat. In a week from now, I will randomly choose one of those who shared their results and send a free copy of my video tutorials Master exposure blending.

You can download the brackets in RAW format from Dropbox here.

Also feel free to share you results on your facebook/flickr/blog, but please don’t forget to give me credit for the photo and link back here. And of course, please don’t use this photo for any commercial purpose (I’m still the author).

Discount code

And for those who would like to check out my video tutorials right away, you can use the code TWENTYOFF to get 20% off the price until the end of next week. You can find the whole description and the buy link on the Master exposure blending page. 

How I blend HDR panoramas

Since today I’m sharing a panoramatic photo with your, I thought it would be a great time to remind you, that there is a guide in which I explain how I combine photos for HDR panoramas. You can find it here or in the sidebar menu.

Alpine panorama

I haven’t posted a panorama for some time, so here is a new one :) This one was take form the Schwarzsee under the Matterhorn. The sky was a little too cloudy when I took this, but the view was still great.

This panorama is 12000x3600px big and was created from 5 shots, each from from 2 exposures (I took 5 exposures for each one, but had no need to use them). If you are curious and want to see it bigger, you can find a 4000x1200px big version in my portfolio here. Just choose the original size in bottom right.  I’m not embedding the big version directly into the blog, as it’s over 6Mb :)