Second issue of the HDRshooter newsletter

Yesterday evening I send out the 2nd issue of the HDRshooter newsletter. It included a lot of whats new on the blog, but also a link to the Capturing fireworks eBook and also a free set of brackets to play with (for the photo I described in the yesterdays post). If you have missed it and don’t want to miss again, feel free to subscribe now. In the welcome email you will get the link to the eBook, and also a list of all the recent issues. Visit the newsletter page to subscribe, or use the form in the sidebar.

And those who got it, please excuse the few typos in it. I have one in the predefined values and that reflected in the newsletter. That should teach me a lesson not to create accounts when I’m on my tablet :)

First page in popular and strange followers

I haven’t posted this yesterday, as I don’t want to include extra stuff in the process posts, but my photo Moving Underground got to the front page of 500px. I have to say big thanks to all of you who voted, liked and commented on my photos there.

On the other hand, since I got a photo selected for the 500px Editor’s choice, I got a big boost in new followers there. Whats strange is, that all of these look like new accounts, no likes, no favorites, no photos. That would be normal, but what is strange, all of these account follow the same people (mostly the last 10 from the Editor’s choice, few more or less sometime). So to me, these all look like fake accounts. But I just can’t figure out what good are they for. What do you think? Btw. to illustrate this, here is a screenshot, showing a page from my followers, and three of those accounts.

Summer evening in Budapest

Same as almost every winter, I just don’t have enough new photos to post on the blog. So as every time, I have to go back to earlier to choose new photos to edit. So for today I chosen one from my summer trip to Budapest.

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

And we have Tuesday again, so it’s time for another process post. As every week I have for you one photo, where I will go through the editing process from start to finish. Btw. I still don’t know what to call these posts. Processing Tuesdays? Edit of the week? Andy suggestions? :)

So for today, I chosen this manual blend of a nice aerial view of Bratislava.

As always I started with Lightroom. For this one, I had to correct the white ballance, and do some perspective corrections, as I was pointing my camera down when I took this. In retrospect when looking at this photo, I could have done a better job cropping, as I haven’t noticed the ship in the bottom right at all before today.

After that I loaded all the exposures into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposureI
2+3. -1EV and -2EV to darken the lights of the city
4+5. +1EV and +2EV to brighten the shadows, mostly in the bottom right
6+7. added glow to the photo, this recovers some lost contrast and also boosts the colors (view my glow tutorial for details)
8+9. this is something I don’t do often but it helps in certain situations. I used the Color Efex Detail Extractor to add more detail and color to the photo. But as I liked the color on the whole image, but the detail only on part, I did the following. I duplicated the layer, set one to Luminosity (so it only affects the detail) and used masks to limit what it affects. Then I set the second one to color for the whole picture.
10. Added 0.5 exposure to the darkest parts of the image
11. Added a little saturation to the whole image

And that was all. Here you can see the original 0EV exposure, and to see the camera settings, please visit the original post here.

Photo selected for Editor’s choice

For the first time ever, one of my photos has been selected for the Editor’s choice category on 500px. Recently I’ve been posting there more and more and my photos get quite a good response there. So it look like more photos will find their way there :) You can see the selected photo here, or my account on 500px here.

Flooded by the sunlight

This looks almost nothing like what I got from the camera. This was such a low contrast scene. The sun with the low clouds and the air being full of moisture, just filled everything with light and it all looked the same. As the name says, it was flooded by sunlight :) When I edited it, I added a lot of contrast, but still wanted to keep the feeling of all the sunlight. I’m not really sure about the color. Somehow especially by photos like this, they look different on every monitor. Sometime the yellow is more red, sometime more green. One would think with all the standards, the manufacturers of screens could finally create all monitors with the same colors. But we can just dream about that.

This image is created from two shots, both 5 exposures. One taken normally, one with the sun covered, so I can remove the flares (check my tutorial on removing flares for more details). I then created two HDR images in Oloneo Photoengine and blended them in Photoshop.

New look for the blog

Recently I felt that my blog needs a little visual refresh, so I’ve been working on it, and today I finally put in on the live server. I think you have all noticed the change already, so there is not much I can say about it :) I just hope you all like it. I changed a lot of stuff, including how the page scales in the browser window, so if any of you see any problem, or bugs, please let me know.

Light tree at the sunset

I really like winter, but with absolutely no snow, I just can’t wait for spring. How much could this photo look differently if everything was covered by snow. The tree would just not looks so out of place.

This is a 5 exposure HDR created in Oloneo Photongine. I then blended in a brighter tree, removed few people and added glow in photoshop. And that’s it.

I don’t do that much astrophotography, as most of my photos are from cities, and you can’t get any stars there. But as I was in a less populated area during Christmas, I tried to take few shots also of the starts. And the day I took this, we got to the cabin around midnight. Most of the day, the sky was covered by clouds, but just a short time before it cleared. And as it was not that cold, I had to take few shots. I’m just sad, that at that time I did’t know that there was a second cabin a little behind this one, which would give me a much better composition. I just found that out the next morning, when we were leaving the area :)

This is a blend from two exposures in Photoshop.