Another tuesday, another process post. For today I chosen a photo of the Scott monument in Edinburgh, Scotland. So to get to this photo, I took 5 photos.

I loaded all the RAW files into Lightroom, where I corrected the white balance first (you can see on the original photo that it has a strong purple cast).

After that I exported all files into Photoshop and did the following steps (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. 0EV exposure
2. -1EV exposure, used luminescence masks and darkened the statue in the middle and few other bright spots
3. -2EV exposure, used to darken the statue even more
4. +1EV exposure, brightened the overall photo
5. +2EV exposure, brightened the sky more and few other areas
6. content aware fill to create a small part of the missing sky, which was lost due to lens correction
7. corrected a light glow around the statue, this sometimes happens when there is a huge difference between dark and light areas
8. added details using the high pass filter
9+10. added glow, check out my Glow tutorial to see exactly how
11. Color effex pro contrast to pull out more detail from the photo
12. darkened the brightest areas a little

And that’s all.
Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.

The composition on this photo is a little boring. I was not even sure if I should share it. But as it’s the only double rainbow (or a regular one) that I ever got a nice photo of, here it is. It just was on the wrong side. Right behind me was the great citiscape of Dresden and there was nothing interesting towards the rainbow. So I at least tried to get the rainbow without any water getting on my lens, and this is what I got.

This is a manual blend from 3 shots.

I just made plans for another photo trip. I’m off in 5 days, this time to Slovenia. I will be visiting Ljubljana and Maribor. The weather forecast is great for the time I’m there, so lets hope for a lot of great photos. But until I get to those here is a photo from Bratislava.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken from the top of the SNP bridge in Bratislava.

I really like fireworks photos. The fireworks always give something special to the landscape. Same here. I took this one quite a long time ago, sometime at the beginning of last year. And they even formed into something that looks like a tree, which worked great for my composition.

This is a single exposure edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

During my stay in Birmingham in April this year, I had quite a bad luck for weather, and had no nice sky. So I tried to get something interesting in the photo and as the area around Selfridges is quite a busy spot for bus traffic, that is what I tried to capture. At least partially it covers the sky.

This is a manual blend from 3 shots (I took 5, bad had no need for 2 of them)