Astana city center panorama

Let’s continue with another panorama today. This one was taken from the top of one of the skyscrapers in the city. It was right after a thunderstorm, so that’s why it’s quite cloudy there.

This is a three shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop. As you maybe noticed, sometime I use Lightroom and sometime PTGui for my panorama. The reason why I use both is simple. While Lightroom now supports HDR panoramas, it can’t create separate blending planes. It only creates one, already combined HDR photo. Since I like to blend in parts of the original shots, I need the blend planes. And this is what I can get from PTGui. So I use Lightroom only for panoramas, where I don’t use multiple exposures.

And here are few details:

In the snow

No, this photo is not actual :) I was looking through my Lightroom library, and randomly stopped on this one, so I thought I edit it and share it with you. I took this shot in early 2015, during a very rare winter day. It just snowed like crazy.

Unluckily, after about a hour in this snow, my camera broke (5D mark II at that time) and I could not take much more photos. But luckily, it started working again the next day, and worked since. Strange how things sometime repair themselves.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

How to create simple action to add watermark

As I mentioned, this will be a text based watermark, how I use. I will do a separate guide for a graphic on later, but it’s quite similar.

1. open any image, does not matter which one
2. choose Windows/Actions (or Alt+F9) to turn on the Actions window
3. either select a group to put your new action in, or create a new group by clicking the folder icon, name it and select it

4. create the new action, by clicking the new action button, name it and click record
5. choose the Text tool, select your font, font style and size, click on the image and write the text of your watermark
6. once done, select the move tool to deselect the text

7. select the whole image with Select/All (or Ctrl+A)
8. now align the text with the image, I will do with the bottom right corner
9. choose Layer/Align Layer to Selection/Bottom Edges to align with the bottom edge
10. choose Layer/Align Layer to Selection/Right Edges to align with the right edge
11. deselect the selection with Select/Deselect (or Ctrl+D)

12. now we move the text a bit away from the edge. Just hit the UP arrow key twice and the LEFT arrow key twice to nudge the text a bit (the move tool should be still selected)
13. click on stop to finish the action recording
14. you should have the following action recorded: make text layer, set selection, align current layer, align current layer, set selection and move current layer

Now on any image you can run this action you just created, to add the text you chosen to the bottom right of the image. If you want a different position, just choose different alignments in 9 and 10th step.

Also, don’t forget to save the action set you created. Select it, click on the 4 lines icon in the top right of the window and choose Save Actions…

Rainy night monuments

I’m not sure if it’t the rainy day, the cold I caught somewhere or that they switched time to winter time today, but I’m just so sleepy today. And I slept most of the day also. Still sleepy though. At least it’s Sunday and I had nothing else planed anyway.

But still, here is a quick update to the blog with a new photos. The one for today, is from Astana Kazakhstan, and combines the Expo 2017 sphere building, with the crazy abstract monument right next to it.

This is a blend of three exposures. The base, a darker one to darken the highlight of the statue, and a brighter one to brighter the dark shadows on the building in the background. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

New free ultra-wide wallpapers

It’s time to again update the wallpapers section of this blog with some new wallpapers. Today it’s again a batch of 21:9 wallpapers, fit for an ultrawie monitor. All are again in 3440×1440 resolution and can be downloaded with all other available ones from the wallpapers page here.

And here are the new ones :)