Today I have for you another processing post. They seem to be quite popular, so I will continue with them. I really hope they are helpfull to some of you or at least intereting :)

So for today I chosen one of my favorite photos, one from the Bojnice castle. The light difference here was very high, with the castle brightly lit and the stone wall in front of the camera haveing no light at all.

So to get to the image I took 10 brackets overall. First I a 5 exposure shot of the castle. I saw that the wall was still too dark on the +2EV exposure, so I changed the ISO from 100 to 1600 and did a second series just for the wall (I could have done it also without the ISO change, but it would take very long exposures to get any light there)

After that I exported all the images from Lightroom into photoshop, while only adding a little vibrance and some noise reduction.

Then I continuead as follows (numbered from bottom up)

1. 0EV exposure, from teh darker series
2. -1EV exposure to darken the sky and the castle
3. -2EV exposure to darkent the castle
4 to 7. -1EV to +2EV exposure from teh bright series to brighten the foreground and the wall
8. -1EV exposure from the dark series to correct few areas with a bad contrast
9. Color effex pro Tonal contrast to add more detail to few areas
10. Darkened the lights with a luminance mask
11. Color effex pro Pro contrast to add more local contrast to the photo
12+13. I retouched a little stand that was next to the castle, it really bothered me there :)
14. Added contrast to the basic midtones
15+16. Added more glow
16. Darkened the bright lights
17. Removed the greeen color cast from the bright lights
18. Desatureated the most saturated colors (mask created with TK Actions)
19. Darkened the very bright lights

Feel free to ask any questions about this

Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposures from both series of brackets.

I know, I know, another shot of the bridge. It was just such a beautiful sunrise, that I just edit one photo after another from it :) Hope nobody minds.

This is a HDR from 5 shots created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with few of the original exposures in Photoshop.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had few more photos of the Liberty bridge prepared. Most of them are from the sunrise, but this one is from the evening blue hour. You can actually very easily determine if its evening or morning just by looking at the water. If the reflection is nice, it’s morning, it its not nice it’s evening. There are so many ships on the Danube, that the almost water never gets calm in the evening.

This is a manual blend from 7 shots.

500px

I haven’t been posting much to my 500px account, but I decided I will put some of my favorite photos there. And yesterday I put up the photo Epic sunset form Paris (http://500px.com/photo/46334820) and it actually reached the first page of popular photos there for today :). So I think I will put few more up there :)

By La Defense

I already had another bridge photo ready, but than I thought that it will start to get a little boring, with all the bridge photos, so I decided for something different. So here is one of the La Defense in Paris.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with some of the original exposures. The HDR was created from 7 exposures.

This week is mostly about bridges, as that’s almost the only thing I took photos of earlier this week in Budapest. Somehow bridges are my most favorite photo subject, closely followed by reflections. And here I have both. I really prefer to have a real reflection in my photos. And to be able to get one in Budapest, one really has to get up early. Already around 6 am the ships start to go up and down the Danube and the water traffic is quite in the way. But right around the sunrise, the water is very calm and reflects everything like a mirror.

This is a 7 exposure HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with the original exposures in Photoshop.