Planing my first trip for this year

As I mentioned few posts ago, I need to plan some trips for this year. And just today, I started planing the first bigger one, as I bought a ticket to Dubai :). I still have to wait a month before I go there, but I already can’t wait. It will be 7 days filled with photos, photos and more photos :)

A little bit of snow by the river

I like to tone my photos more towards the blue, but I really liked this soft yellow/red cast this one had, so I let it be. I could even make this shots from a single exposure, but in the end I used there. I’m just so used to blending, that it’s sometimes easier to do it, than to get more from a single photo. And blending usually results in less noise anyway.

This is a blend from three exposures, created in Photoshop.

I finally got to watch the new Thor movie, and as it’s full of London shots, I was motivated to go through my London photos, to see if I can find a photo that was edit worthy. Not much there anymore, as I was there only two days. But somehow I always choose something :)

This is a HDR created in Oloneo from 5 exposures and finished in Photoshop.

I just started planing my first trip for this year, but as that’s still quite a few weeks away. So until at least the weather gets better, so I can get some new photos, I have to do what I always do :) Look through my old ones to choose which one to edit. It’s really not that easy to have a daily photo blog. Especially in days like this, when I have so much other work, and no time to edit. But I haven’t missed a day in over three years, and I don’t plan to :)

So for today, a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and finished in Photoshop. For those who don’t know this bridge yet from my photos, it’s the Apollo bridge in Bratislava.

Another week, another processing Tuesday. To make it a little different, I chosen to show you how I edited my first star trails shot. And for those who never did a shot like that, this post will also show how to combine the images. So here goes.

For my final result:

I took 46 exposures, each one taken at 30s, f2.8 and ISO 800. They all looked something like this, just with the stars in different positions.

I started my work as always in Lightroom, where I applied noise reduction, cropped the image and removed chromatic aberrations and lens distortions. I also corrected the white balance.

From there I loaded all the images into Photoshop Layers. I selected all the layers except the first one and changed the blending mode to Lighten. That means that Photoshop will choose the lightest pixel for every spot in the photo from all the layers.

I then hidden all the layers, except the first one, and one by one I went through all the layers, checking if it contains any trails from passing planes. If I seen any, I added a layer mask, and removed it.

After that I merged all the layers, so I don’t have so much layers to work with and continued as follows (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. the merged layer
2. one of the exposures, where the tree was lighten up by car lights. I added it to brighten the tree
3. I removed few items in the foreground I didn’t liked
4. Color Efex Pro contrast on the foreground, to brighten it up and bring out the details
5. curves to add medium contrast
6. levels to bring out all the white areas in the photo, specially the stars
7. hue/saturation to tone down the red color cast from the tree
8. just a merged layer, I needed to apply a action on (and forgot to delete :))
9-10. added glow, using the glow action in my tutorial
11. added a little more contrast
12. added more saturation to under saturated areas, the mask was created using TK actions.

And that’s all I did here.

Photography Masterclass magazine

One of my photos was featured in the latest issue of the Photography Masterclass magazine for iOS. And they also gave me this link to a special page for anyone who would like to get a free 3 month subscription to the magazine. So feel free to use it :)

Quiet blue hour

I’m was quite busy the recent few days, and I still will be few more, so I don’t have that much time to edit. So I’m choosing photos where there is not that much to edit :). Same today. This is a blue hour shot I took last week by the SNP bridge. It mostly from single exposure -2EV in which I brightened the foreground from the -1EV and darkened the castle with a -3EV exposure I created in Lightroom. That almost all I did.