How about a process post today? Again I chosen a little more complicated photo, a vertorama. It’s only from two shots, but it nicely shows the whole process. So to get to this photo from Bardejovske Kupele, I did the following:

As always I started with loading all the files into Lightroom. There were 10 of them in total, but I could go with fewer of them anyway. I just took 5 different exposures to be sure I have enough.

I corrected lens distortion and white balance and exported all as 16-bit tiff files. Those I loaded into PTGui, to create the vertorama blends. (this is explained in detail in the HDR panoramas tutorial)

From where I ended with 5 vertoramas, which I then loaded in Oloneo Photoengine. There simply by changing the strength and contrast I got this result:

Continuing, I loaded all the vertoramas and also the Photoengine result into Photoshop, where I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2+3+4+5. This is the vertorama created from the 0EV expsurs, modified for color and exposure and then blended into the Oloneo result. I needed to replace the sky, as there was ghosting from the moving clouds.
6. -2EV to darken few small parts
7. +2EV to brighten few ares
8. desaturated the grass and it looked too radioactive
9. Color efex Pro contrast used on the image to get more detail.
10+11. Added glow to the photo.
12. More contrast to the photo, but not on the darker parts of the building
13. desaturated oversaturated colors
14. nose reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware
15. little bit more contrast to the whole image

I also corrected the perspective using perspective crop, and cropped the image to remove the black areas.

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 have never played golf, bu hopefully one day I get to try it :) But as I was taking photos from the Cayan tower in the Dubai Marina, this golf course in the distance looked quite interesting. It was the only big green area visible, and it just shined in the middle of the city. So of course I had to take a photo :)

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

Yes, another reflection :) This time even with a yacht in the middle. This is actually the only area in the Marina where we were stopped by a security guard for using tripods. But only first time. The second time we were there later at night, and no guard in sight. It’s also a great area to sit down for a dinner in one of the many restaurants there. During my visit, the temperature in the evening was around 20-24 degrees, so just perfect to spend few hours with good friends and good food there :)

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

IFTTT

I just recently started using IFTTT and it’s looks quite useful. Especially to automate some thing around the social networks. For those who don’t know, IFTTT (ifttt.com) is a service where you can automate different tasks around different services. I personally set up few for now, like automatically post my instagram photos to twitter, or my flickr uploads to tumblr, so all the staff I always do anyway, and this makes them easier.

I just haven’t found a way to post to twitter, so it generates the hashtags for me. Not sure if it’s even possible :) Any of you use IFTTT? Any tips for good recipes there?

Lost in the reflection

I look for reflections everywhere, and the small pools around the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi are perfect for those. In some the water moves a little, so making it a little harder to get a nice reflection, but some are completely still.

There was a crazy high dynamic range in this photo. I even took 7 exposures, and still the brightest photo was not bright enough. And the very hard transition between bright and very dark areas make the editing quite difficult. It’s very easy to get a lot of haloing or a very hard transition between the two. But somehow I got almost the look I wanted :) Hope you like it :)

This is a HDR from 7 exposures created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

The Burj Khalifa looks great in photos, but it creates the same problem with composition as all the other isolated high buildings. You either leave it out of a photo, or you include it and create a lot of empty space with just the sky. But as one of course wants to have this great building in the photos, one does the best one can :)

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