How the week passed quickly :) And since it’s Monday again, it’s time for another process post. This time it’s a vertorama, so get ready for a little longer one today. So let’s start with a look at the finished photo. It’s a shot of one of the churches in the Open Air museum in Bardejovske Kupele in Eastern Slovakia. I used a vertorama, as I wanted to have the whole church, without having a very strong distortion in the photo.

Overall I took 12 shots, 2 series of 6 brackets. In the end I didn’t use the brightest exposures. I took them as parts of the church were in a shadow, but I had no need for them. As always I started in Lightroom, where I removed lens distortion, vignetting and chromatic abberations.

 
Here you can see the original 0EV exposures

 
Then I continued in PTgui, where I created the blended planes (the whole process is described in this tutorial). I had few issues, as PTgui refused to blend the shots correctly. The repeating areas confused it, and it always created a bad transition. Even when I manually created more alignment points, it still was not properly blended. So in the end, using the masking in PTGUI, I removed most of the upper shot, to force the blend to be in a more diverse area. This really helped and I got my result. Here you can see a screenshot from PTGUI, with the mask applied. This also removed all the people from the finished panorama.

 
From there I got 5 blended planes as a result. I loaded them all into Oloneo Photoengine, to create a HDR. As usually, I only changed the strength and contrast to get to the result I wanted.

 
After that I continued into Photoshop. I loaded all the blended planes and the HDR into separate layers. I then cropped the empty areas out, and only left a little, which I could correct with retouching. Then I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3+4. The sky replaced from the -1EV exposures blend. It has been brightened with an exposure layer and had saturation added to it, to fit the HDR.
5. Movement in the trees removed using the 0EV exposures
6. A merged layers, on which I removed few dust spots and corrected small missing areas, that were empty after the vertorama blending.
7. Color Efex Pro contrast filter, to get more detail and local contrast in the photo.
8+9. Color balance and Hue/Saturation to tone down the green of the grass.
10. Few more corrections from the +1Ev exposure, to tone down the colors of the walls.
11+12. More overall contrast to the whole photo
13. TK actions saturation mask, used to tone down oversaturated ares.
14. A little bit noise reduction on the photo.

Here you can see the screenshot from Photoshop, and also a screenshot of the saturation mask.

 
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:

New tutorial videos from Trey Ratcliff

I just noticed today, that Trey Ratcliff released new tutorial videos, focusing this time on the use of Lightroom. Even if I don’t really agree with the recent direction of Treys post-processing (he relies too much on filters and presets), Trey has always been a big inspiration for me, and also a big influence on my HDR beginnings. So the new videos are on my to watch list, and once I get to them, I will write up a short review, of what I think about them. For now, you can find more about the videos here.

Sunset at the lighthouse

I usually don’t remove bigger things from my photos, but in this case, there was a ship right next to the lighthouse, which really bothered me. And since this was a long exposure, it was just a blurry mess. So a lot of clone stamping, and it was gone :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. I used a 10-stop ND filter for this photo.

Discount coupon code

Just a little reminder, for the next week, you can still use the coupon code “TWENTYOFF” to get 20% off the price of my video tutorial series, Master Exposure blending.

Different view of the Parliament

While in Budapest, I had the change to get on the roof of one of the hotels in city, which gave me quite a new view of the city center. And one of the photos I took was also this one, towards the Hungarian parliament. To bad that all the buildings in the Budapest center are all the same heights, so even when one gets on a roof, one is newer above the city. Actually only on the top of the St. Stephens basilica, one gets a little higher up. Of course one can go onto the Buda side, on top of the hill, but that’s a different view, from far away.

So as I said, this is a little different view of the Parliament, one that even I haven’t seen before :) This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, and finished in Photoshop. I mostly worked on toning down the colors, as the yellow decorative lights in Budapest are really extreme.

Free copy of DXO Filmpack 3

I randomly came across this offer from DXO. For the next two weeks, one can get a free copy of their Photoshop plugin, that includes filters that simulate analog film cameras. So if you think you could use something like that, give it a try. And of course, it’s free, so nothing to lose :) The plugin can be downloaded from here.

The church on the hill

While I was in Budapest earlier this week, the weather during the day was not that great. Normally I would not really mind, as I would just take photos in the evening and morning, but as I was there taking photos for a client, that could be only taken during the day, this was not the best scenario. Of course it got better in the evening, but that was just too late. But hopefully I got few usable ones :)

This is one taken in the evening, one could say after work :) It’s the Matthias Church on the Buda side of Budapest, on the hill overlooking the city. This is a HDR from 2 exposures (I took more, but as I was zoomed it a lot, few of them got bury), created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

I came across this wheel in Budapest quite randomly, as it’s usually not there, and it’s also quite hidden from the street level by all the surrounding buildings. Still, I really wanted to also go up, but just didn’t got to it. A two day visit is really very short. But still, I took few photos, even if the ground, but I think it would look much better from a high up spot. But there isn’t really one accessible in the area.

And since I took a behind the scenes photo while taking this one, I’m also including it here :)

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