Mountain hut

Daily photo - Mountain hut

Time for another landscape photo from Tatra mountains - today I would like to share image showing mountain hut in Dolina Kościeliska. Conversion to black & white was sort of natural thing to do for that scene. Snow was already completely white (well, almost - it had a little bit of blue cast), trees were almost black (they were dark green) so I just needed to drop saturation to 0 to remove any remaining colour and bost contrast a little bit.

BTW I miss the mountains quite a lot so I would finally need to visit them again :)

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Sunset in Tatra mountains

Daily photo - Sunset in Tatra Mountains

I'm still very busy (I don't know why but generally speaking in summer I have always much less free time than in the other parts of the year) so once again I have to post an image with very little text. I hate that and I intended to avoid this but... without these short posts my blog would be pretty much dead at this time of the year. Hopefully I will be able to write more in a few days or weeks from now.

Ok, today photo shows sunset in Tatra mountains captured last autumn. I was really tired at this stage, hiking for almost whole day so I even didn't set up my tripod to get this shot. To reduce camera shake caused by trembling hands I set very fast shutter speed (1/640 s) and it did the trick - image has satisfactory sharpness.

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Post-processing Wednesday: Big Ben in the evening

Time for another post in my Post-processing Wednesday series. For more posts from this series go here.

In this case Before photo is 0 EV photo without any adjustments and After image is tone-mapped and finished HDR image.

About source images

Today image showing some of the London iconic buildings, Big Ben and House of Parliament, is one of my favourite HDR images taken recently. It was beautiful blue hour with the sky being really blue and with some nice orange lights of the House of Parliament and Big Ben contrasting with water and sky.

You can read more about the image in this post. In that very post not only I show exact location and EXIF of the image but I also share some compositional tips.

As you can see in the Before photo above, some highlights were slightly blown out. At the same time some areas were darker than I intended them to be (especially House of Parliament and Westminster Bridge). So I decided to capture HDR image and for that purpose I took 5 exposure at 1 EV spacing. You can see all exposures below. Going from left to right and top to bottom they are: 0 EV, -1 EV, +1 EV, -2 EV and +2 EV.

Darkest exposure (-2 EV) have all lights correctly exposed and brightest one (+2 EV) exposes shadows correctly.

Editing in Lightroom

As always I started my editing in Lightroom. This time, however, the only adjustment I made was applying lens correction by going to Lens Correction tab and checking both Enable Profile Corrections and Remove Chromatic Aberration checkboxes.

Editing in Photomatix Pro

After applying lens corrections to all my source images I opened them in Photomatix Pro 5 by using export plugin to Photomatix. In Photomatix I selected Contrast Optimizer processing method with following settings:

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Royal Palace in Madrid (B&W)

Daily photo - Royal Palace in Madrid

Unfortunately I'm very busy recently and despite the fact I still have a few thousand photos to process (and a few tutorials to share) I hardly have time to finish them. So today post will contain just a photo.

This photo is black & white version of image from Madrid I shared in the past. Black & white version has really nice contrast I think - something that I missed in the original colour image. You can view original HDR image here.

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8 million views of my photos

8 million views of my photos

First of all, I'm very happy to share with you something that I have just discovered about one of my online accounts - my photos and other posts on Google+ (you can view my profile here) were viewed a total number of 8 million times. Yes, 8 million - quite a lot :)

It's a great achievement especially as I only have 6.5 thousand "constant" followers (and quite frankly I have no idea how to improve this).

BTW I'd like to remind you about my Newsletter. In case you don't want to miss any interesting content from my blog, make sure to subscribe to it by visiting this link.  

Daily photo - London in the evening

Today photo is another HDR image taken in London. I captured this one during blue hour. I used exposure of 1.3 second for middle photo to blur water a little bit

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Tutorial: Add sunset glow

Sometimes sunsets aren't as warm as we would like them to be, they miss this very nice warm glow around the sun... But fortunately adding this glow (or making it more pronounced) is very easy and today I'll show you how to do this in Photoshop.

Written version

If you don't want to watch video tutorial or prefer tutorials in written form, here are the steps I took to create this effect in the video above:

1. Create new empty layer by selecting Layer -> New Layer from main menu and change its name to Sunset glow.
2. Add layer mask to Sunset glow layer.
3. Select newly added layer mask, make sure you have white colour for Foreground and black for Background selected.
4. Select Gradient tool and make sure Radial Gradient is selected.
5. Draw gradient starting from the sun down. This is to limit effect of your sunset glow effect.
6. Select your Background layer and sample it near the sun area using Eyedropper Tool. Basically you should get golden, orange, yellow or other warm tone.
7. Select Sunset glow layer again, select Paint Bucket tool and fill layer with previously selected golden colour.
8. Change blending mode of Sunset glow layer to Overlay or Soft Light and decrease its opacity to around 20 - 40% depending on the effect you want to achieve.
9. Now you're done. However, you might want to adjust layer mask of Sunset glow layer to further limit the range of this effect.

Below you can see sample image to which I applied this easy technique. If you would like to see original image simply move your mouse pointer over the image. Image is much warmer and in my opinion simply looks more pleasant.

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Colourful tree

Daily photo - Colourful tree

Today I'll share just a photo without much writing. Although this post will be very short, you can expect new interesting tutorial this week :)

I saw this colourful tree while wandering in one of the parks in London (unfortunately I don't remember where it was exactly, I only know that it was close to Buckingham Palace). As I found it rather beautiful I decided to fill whole frame with it.

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Winter wonderland

Daily photo - Winter wonderland

It's still very hot here in Warsaw so today I will post one more winter photo :)

This time I would like to share HDR photo from Tatra mountains, which I myself like very much. It was getting late and dark at the time I captured this image (well it was probably something like 3 PM but in Winter day is rather short here) so there wasn't much natural light available and what was left had blue tint to it. Together with snow on the ground and trees it created very magical although cold scenery. I decided to "enhance" it by applying simple painterly processing to it.

You can learn more about my painterly processing from this simple tutorial.

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Post-processing Wednesday: Forest paradise

Time for another post in my Post-processing Wednesday series. For more posts from this series go here.

About photo

Today I would like to share post-processing steps for one of my landscape photos taken last autumn in Polish Tatra mountains. Weather was rather ugly, it was cloudy, dark and raining often so dynamic range of the scene was very low so there was no need to use HDR. That's why I took just a single exposure.

Adjustments to make

In this case Before image shows unedited image and After shows finished image after editing it in Lightroom. Generally speaking Before image already looks quite nice but it would benefit from a few adjustments that were shown in the image above and were listed below:

1. Increase global contrast as the image has fairly low contrast,
2. Increase saturation of yellows and reds to make image more vibrant,
3. Darken rocks in foreground as they attract attention to much and are therefore distracting.

For more details about this photo, including exact location and EXIF metadata as well as link to buying a print, please read this post.

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Frozen lake

Daily photo - Frozen lake

It's extremely hot in Poland in last few days so when earlier today I came across this photo from winter it made me feel a little better and so I decided to share it.

Even though this HDR image isn't extremely interesting (I hoped to capture sunrise but there wasn't one unfortunately), what I like about it is the blue colour of ice as well as various detail and textures in foreground.

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Review: Topaz Detail

If you follow my blog you probably know that I use Topaz Plug-ins quite a lot. Today I would like to review one of them - Topaz Detail which I often use for sharpening and enhancing details in my images.

Honestly speaking, for a long time I wasn't big fan of Topaz Detail - results I got from it where often grungy and my images didn't look realistic. So I preferred to use other tools to enhance details in my images. However, after I learnt to use it properly my images became much sharper and now contain more detail.

What is Topaz Detail for?

Topaz Detail plug-in, currently in version 3.2, is a tool for enhancing details in your images. From small textures, to larger detail like droplets in macro photos, to very large like rocks in mountain scenery or features of a building. I use it mainly for landscape and architecture photos but it works really well also for animals or portrait photography what you will see in a few seconds. Basically it suitable for any kind of photography where there are details that you would like to make more pronounced.

Apart from ability to enhance details Topaz Detail also allows to improve exposure, tones and colours in the image. Most of the time I don't use this feature (as I have other tools for that) but it's a nice addition for people not having other plug-ins that deal with colours and exposure like Topaz Adjust or Nik Color Efex for instance.

User Interface

Interface of Topaz Detail 3 is very pretty and intuitive. On the left you can see presets, in the middle there is preview image and on the right there are adjustments. In the bottom-left corner of preview image there is also a preview for currently selected preset. Note that this preview goes away as soon as you move your mouse from the preset name.

GUI is very nice and similar to other Topaz Plugins so if you're familiar with them, using Topaz Detail will be very easy for you. And even if you haven't used any plug-in from Topaz team you will quickly understand how to use it as GUI is very intuitive.

It can be broken into a few sections:

• On the left there is a window listing presets, both built-in and custom ones. For convenience presets are grouped into a few categories (you can create your own too) like Creative Detail Collection or Stylized Detail Collection,
• In the middle there is a preview image showing effect of the adjustments. Of course you can zoom in and zoom out,
• On the right there is a window with sliders that let you adjust details in your image very precisely.

You can adjust strength of small, medium and large details separately what gives great flexibility and power. I mainly adjust small and medium details, what when done right has the effect of sharpening the image, because increasing strength of large details seems to increase clarity of the image and to control clarity I prefer to use Topaz Clarity as it gives me more control.

Moreover you can limit your adjustments to shadows or highlights. And finally you can create layer mask limiting scope of the effect even further.

I mentioned built-in presets above. As any other Topaz plug-in, Topaz Detail comes with a collection of presets to get you started.

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Newsletter #1 and Ruins in Chichen Itza

Post-processing Wednesday - changes again

Normally there should be another part of Post-processing Wednesday series today but I decided to change the rules once again (sorry guys!). It won't appear every week but rather every other week. Why? Well, I noticed that if I share new posts in this series too often less people read them than when I share them less often. However, at some stage I might go back to the idea of publishing new posts of this series on a weekly basis.

So next "post-processing" post will appear on Wednesday, 9th June 2014.

Newsletter Issue 1

Later today first issue of HDR Photographer Newsletter will be delivered to the subscribers (there aren't many of you but good thing is that this number is slowly rising every day :) ). As I already mentioned, starting with next issue there will be some subscribers-exclusive content. If you don't want to miss it, make sure to "register".

You can subscribe to the Newsletter by visiting this link.

Daily photo - Ruins in Chichen Itza

I shared some photos and stories from ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico before. Today I would like to show you one more high dynamic range photo of the ruins there. It's some kind of a temple and I think it looks pretty nice against the blue sky.

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