Exploring the colors of Spring

And here are a few photos I took today. I went with shallower DOF here, to give them this soft look. All taken handheld with the Canon 70-200 F2.8 lens.

I decided to share them all in a higher resolution (2560px tall or wide) and without a watermark, so if any of you would like to use them as phone/tablet wallpapers, you can easily do so.

View from the Sky Park towers

Recently I posted a few different photos of the Sky Part towers in Bratislava, so how about today a picture was taken from the top of one of them. This photo is not that recent, so you can still be missing the 4th tower in the background. Either way, it makes for an interesting view. I actually wanted to take the photo a bit later, during the blue hour, but it became so windy up there that day, that I could not hold the camera steady enough. The wind would move the whole tripod around; if I were not holding it, it would blow it away.

Still, this photo is a vertorama, from two shots. Each shot blended from three exposures. Edited in Photoshop. I used the 17mm tilt-shift lens here, and if you don’t know what kind of lens it is, or how it’s used, check out my guide here.

Lago di Braies reflection

I still have many photos that I never edited or posted, like this one from Lago di Braies, from all the travels I did over the many years. There are different reasons for not doing so. Either they are too similar to what I already posted, I could not get the result I wanted in editing, or it was just too much work to remove stuff I did not like. But as the times change and the programs get better, it is easier to get the result now. That is why one always should take photos in RAW, as you can always go back and edit what you got.

So for today, I went back through my photo archives, to my trip to the Dolomites in Italy, to the Lago di Braies, and edited a photo I took that day. This is a blend from 3 exposures, created in Photoshop, with some editing done with Nik Collection Color Efex. I used the 12mm Laowa lens here, to get a nice wide shot. A little behind-the-scenes shot on the side here.

Btw. I also upped the resolution of the photos I’m posting here, up to 1800px wide. As the resolution of screens went up quite a lot in recent years, one just has to keep up. I also updated to a 32-inch 4K screen and the 1350px wide I used to use before,  just looks tiny on such a screen. And it’s just the same on phones and tablets. I have not decided yet, but maybe I just go even bigger, jump to 2K, or even directly 4K resolution. Who knows what the future brings, it’s easier to change before technology catches up.

What do you think? Rather smaller images, so the page loads quicker, or better to go bit, and focus on the quality and look?

The little police car under the Eiffel Tower

I took this photo around 6 years ago now. You can actually tell that it’s an older photo, as there is no glass wall in front of the tower. While I was taking photos there that evening, a police car stopped right in my way, so I just used it for composition here. It looked tiny, a bit funny, in front of the huge Eiffel Tower.

This is a vertorama from 3 photos, blended in Photoshop. No HDR bracketing here. I used around 20 Generative Fill layers to get rid of people standing around the area.

Removal of objects

This one is the most interesting part for me, as a photographer. It is not that easy to get rid of things in a photo, and one has to use many different techniques. This makes things much easier. The only issue is the quality of the result. While it looks good, the resolution is just lower and there is a loss of detail. If you compare it to a traditional way, of creating multiple exposures and then blending them (as shown here). But that technique is not always possible, or you just do have time to wait.

I can also imagine this helping a lot with problems like burnout highlights and lens flares. When you miss this when taking the photo, it’s hard to fix.

Here I edited one of my photos from Paris, where I removed all the people waiting in front of the Moulin Rouge. What do you think?

Expanding the canvas with Generative Fill

Another use I can see is expanding the canvas. There could have been many reasons why you could not capture all that you wanted. Something in the way, the lens not wide enough, people standing around, small space to shoot from, or something else. Photoshop Betta using Generative Fill will give you multiple options and the results are quite impressive. From what I saw, having a transparent background sometimes gives better results. Also expanding already existing photos gives better results than trying to add new elements to photos. It just looks more natural.

Here first is an example of the Scott monument in Edinburgh, where I could not move further away from it, due to a road. Generative Fill nicely expanded the photo, giving the monument more space in the shot.

Or a bit different example with a photo from the 5 Fingers in the Austrian Alps, where using the Generative fill, I change a simple photo into a panorama. But yeah, the loss of quality is visible. I included two different versions here, but you can regenerate the result as many times as you want.

Generating images

The last option where you can use Generative Fill is to completely create new elements for empty or existing images. As mentioned you can continue selecting part of the image and so adding more elements to it.

Here, I took the initial image from Santa Magdalena in Italy, and at first I selected the bottom part, and used Generative Fill with the keywords “pond reflection” to create the bottom part. Then I selected a few areas around the newly generated parts and with the keyword “rocks” added a few rocks to make it more interesting.

I did try to add a few other things, like horses or a bench, but the results were quite bad. It just did not blend into the image at all.