Merry Christmas

I hope all of you have a great day, if you celebrate Christmas or if you don’t. And I also hope you have a bit of Winter where you are, as there is none in Bratislava. But at least it stopped raining :)

And here are few Christmas photos I took over the last years, to make the site look a bit festive :)

Fast moving clouds over Kuchajda

Kuchajda lake in Bratislava is really perfect for reflection. It’s almost always perfectly calm. That if if you are lucky and there are no ducks or swans swimming around in front of your camera. Still, you will probably get a reflection if you go there.

It’s even better if there are fast moving clouds moving across the sky combined with the sunset right in front of you. Usually makes for some nice colors.

This is a single exposure, double processed in Lightroom and then blended in Photoshop.

Dubai Lights

The lights on the Burj Khalifa are just stunning. But that so typical over the top you see all over Dubai. It really is a stunning city :). I did quite a lot of photos from this spot, as I just setup my camera to do interval shooting and let it run during the whole light show. Will share even more later on.

This is a single exposure ecited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Hot day in the vineyard

It got a bit colder recently, so of course I will post a photo from a very warm day :) This one is from my trip to Portugal last year. It was in the middle of August and the temperatures were around 40-44 degrees all the time. Really not something I’m used to. But when one takes photos, one even forgets about that :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. Taken at the Quinta da Roeda in the Douro Valley.

First since it is a panorama I combined the shots together in Lightroom. As you can see the result, the photo is a bit bland. That normal, as it’s an undeveloped RAW file. They tend to be quite bland.

I started with the first edit. Changed the white balance to make a more warmer photo, opened the shadows, darkened the highlights and added more vibrance. As you can see, the result was already quite nice. But since the lighthouse is white, the tweaks to highlights and shadows made it look dirty and too dark.

So here where the second edit comes in. First I exported this one into Photoshop of course. For the second one I focused only on how the lighthouse looks. I removed the highlights and shadow tweaks, and I added exposure until the lighthouse was as bright I as I wanted it to be. As you can see this edit is really overexposed in most areas, but that’s not a problem as it will be blended into the first one.

So when I had both, I opened both in layers, hidden the brighter one, used the want tool to select the sky, inverted the selection and painted over the lighthouse. Then I finished it with tweaking the opacity of the second layer, so it nicely matches the background.

You can see the resulting photo in this post.

And that’s it :) You can do as many edits of a photo you want and then just blend them like this afterwards. In HDR this is used when doing a single RAW HDR, when you create multiple version of the same photo by under and over exposing it, so creating the other brackets needed. But that a quite ineffective approach. Rather edit the shot by focusing on the result you already want, but in just a selection of it.