I so wish I had more time in London and of course better weather. But still I try to get as many photos from that trip as I can. But I also want to get back to London and get many more. But this time I will wait at least until late spring for revisit. I will never ever believe anyone who says that there is no snow in London, as it snowed the day I was there, and it was April :)

This is a HDR created in Oloneo, taken during a very cold and cloudy April day.

As usually, another Tuesday, another process post. For today I chosen a sunrise photo of the Liberty bridge in Budapest. So let’s get to it :)

To get this final result

I first corrected the lens distortion and white balance in Ligtroom and exported all the files as 16bit tiff image. I loaded them into Oloneo photoengine and merged them. As always, I only change the strength, nothing else. I saved the result as another 16bit tiff file. After that I loaded all the files into Photoshop.

There I did the following (numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo result
2. +1EV exposure to get rid of the car in the shot
3+4. +2EV exposure and a exposure layer that darkens it by one stop, which I used to get rid of another part of a car
5+6. 0EV exposure and a exposure layer that brightens it by one stop, which I used to get rid of the rest of the car
7+8. -1EV that has been brightened by 2 stop, to correct a very small part in the image
9. darkened the sky from the -2EV exposure
10+11. added contrast to the basic mid-tones, and then the layer was put into a folder, so I can create a secondary mask, and remove it from the bridge
12. darkened the brightest light
13. brightened the bottom part of the bridge
14. a little bit of noise reduction
15. Color effex Darken/Lighten center to create a vignette
16. toned down the overall saturation of the image

And that’s all. Feel free to ask any question and here is the oloneo result and the original 0EV exposure.

I don’t know why, but according to wikipedia, this bridge has four names. Old bridge, State bridge, Main bridge and also Drava bridge. Look like they really could not agree on one name. And I thought I made an error when I called it the Main bridge in one of my posts and the Old bridge in another :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

I really like it when they have the fireworks earlier. Around the end of the blue hour is the best time in my opinion. It’s dark enough so you see the fireworks, but still there is enough light so you get very nice photos. Of course they don’t do that very often and you get fireworks late at night. Of course it was the same in Budapest, so I only got a black sky here.

This is a single exposure edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

So it’s not all just landscapes and architecture here, for today I chosen a little different photo. So yes, sometimes there are also people in my photos. It’s a nice change from time to time.

I took this one in the Botanical garden in Bratislava, where I did a little photo-shoot with Alexandra. I love shooting with natural light, and it’s the same here. It was a lovely sunny day, and the sun gave a great back-light, which I countered with a weak fill in flash from the front. I also used the Canon 70-200mm F2.8 lens, which is just so great for these type of photos. It’s very sharp and also gives a very lovely bokeh. Of course this is not HDR, this was edited mostly in Lightroom, with few minor tweaks and sharpening in Photoshop.