Night tram on the Old bridge

Today’s photo is of a night tram passing on the Old bridge in Bratislava. As you can see, the bridge is quite colorfully lit up in this one. This is not every day, this was just because of the White night even last year, when they install lights all over the city. I was ever standing on the tracks when I took it, which I would not do any other day there. And I don’t suggest anyone does it.

At first I was not sure if I even edit this photo. It was very dark and a little part of the bridge was missing. And I really don’t like that. But I tried and I got a result I liked. This is a single exposure, broken up into multiple and then blended back together. Then I used a second photo from that night, from which I pasted in the missing part.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. As you can see, it was really dark, and the size is a bit differnt, as I added the part on top.

Prague in 4K wallpapers

As I mentioned, today all the new wallpapers are from Prague, or better said, the Prague castle. As always, they are all in 3840x2160px and you can download them from the 4K wallpapers page here.

Cloud covered sunset

While testing the Topaz Adjust AI, I tried a very similar photo as one of my tests. And since I liked the result, I decided to finish it. I took this photo last year in Manarola, Cinque Terre in Italy. We were waiting for the blue hour, as the sunset was right behind us. But it looked so great, I had to take few shots anyway, even without the tow.

This is a blend of three exposures, combined with the Topaz Adjust AI HDR style result.

Late evening at the Business Bay in Dubai

Today’s photo is another one from last year’s trip to Dubai. This one was taken one late evening in the Business bay. I really like to include the railing in this area, as it creates a nice curved line that guides your eyes into the photo. It especially looks good with a nice wide angle lens, like the 12mm one I used here.

If you need some tips for spots to take photos in Dubai, check out my Top photography spots in Dubai list.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Topaz Adjust AI

Every Topaz AI application does something different. It resizes, sharpens and similar. Adjust AI does a bit more. It tries to give a nicer, more vibrant or HDR-like look to your photos. So it does not affect only one thing.

Compared to other applications from Topaz AI, it also offers much more settings. You have the basic selector, where you can turn the Adjust AI effect on to standard or HDR style. But additional to this, you get all the basic and few advanced photo editing tools. You get brightness sliders, color, contrast, detail, and grain sliders. And to top it off, there is split toning included. This is all here so you can tweak the AI results to your liking.

Additionally, you can use the supplied presets or create your own, and use them directly on your photos.

Using Topaz Adjust AI

Using Topaz Adjust AI is very straightforward. It supports a huge list of file formats, including RAW files. It even can save the results as a DNG file, which is just great.

Once you open a file, you either choose a preset or choose one of the AI settings and choose how strong the effect is. Once this is calculated, you can use the additional slider to tweak the result. That’s it.

I tried multiple inputs and the results are a bit all over the place. Some I like, some I did not. This is not a surprise, as they are very dependent on the photo I used.

One strange thing I noticed though, is that when I used RAW files from my camera, the results were very blue. Every single time. If I converted the file first to JPG or TIFF, the problem did not appear.

Look at these three versions of the same photos. First one is RAW on standard Adjust AI style, the second is a TIFF on standard style and the last one TIFF on HDR style. You can easily see the blue tint I mentioned.

Sample results

Let’s look at some photos. There are all edited only in Topaz Adjust AI, all from a TIFF file. You can slide the middle point to compare to the original photo. The original is always on the left.

For the first photo, I used the HDR style, changed the temperature to a warmer one and toned down the small detail, as it looked too grainy.

This one is again the HDR style, but I brightened it a bit and added more contrast afterward.

Here I used the HDR style, added a bit of saturation and opened the shadows.

For the last one, I used the standard style, went down with the highlights, added saturation and reduced the small details.