HDR photography tutorial with photomatix tone-mapping and Nik efex

New York, I love you

admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:08:07 +0000

Visiting NYC was a great adventure as someone who loves photography. There are amazing architectures in the city that one may spend several days but cannot finish shooting the amazing structures. Meanwhile, I started to do some 360 degree work. Here is a sample that I really liked the result, which was taken in NYC Braynt Park.

Upper Antelope Canyon, the throat

admin — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:13:50 +0000

Another one from Upper Antelope Canyon. The colors and the light in the canyon was amazing. Each season presents different colors…I shoot this one by aiming straight to the sky in narrow canyon. This is not an HDR, it is from a single shot…

Grand Canyon, the first lights

admin — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:25:25 +0000

We recently went to an RV trip with 12 friends to Arizona and Utah to visit all great Canyons and National Parks. The first day, we woke up around 4:30 am to catch the first lights in Grand Canyon…

Antelope Canyon

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 17:01:03 +0000

We took about 9 days to travel in Arizona and Utah to visit most of the great National Parks and Canyons. We rented an RV and stopped at the campgrounds near the parks or canyons that we visited. Overall, it was an amazing experience. 9 days in a raw, we woke up early to capture the sunrise and be at the scene at the sunset. This one though is captured during noon time, in Upper Antelope Canyon. One can go there only with a travel agency because the Canyon is very small and the visits has to be organize. Luckily, when we were there, there was not much of people that we could do our shootings relatively freely. This trip was also a great opportunity for me to try my new D800. I also rented 14-24mm Nikkor lens and totally falled in love with it D800 has also a mind blowing performance….One trick that we learn in the Antelope Canyon to get more colors to change the white balance to fluorescent or tungsten. This resulted in increase of blue and purple colors in the photo…

New York streets

admin — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:23:10 +0000

I really enjoyed walking in NYC. I did various shots of typical sites in NYC but I also wanted to create some new perspectives. This one is at the corner of the street turning to Ground Zero. It is a long exposure (about 35 seconds) with a ND 8 stops filter….

New York, Roosevelt Island

admin — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 18:20:53 +0000

I was in New York for a few days. I stayed at a friend’s place in Roosevelt Island. Her roof top had an amazing view. About 1 hour after arrival, I did not want to miss the first sunset of my visit, and went to the roof top. I used my tokina 12-24 mm lens at 12 mm and made 4 vertical from left to right (the upper half of the photo) and 3 horizontal from right to left (the lower part). Then I made the individual HDR images of 7 using photomatix with the same settings. Then these 7 are combined in Photoshop into panorama (auto mode). I made a bit of cloning to feel the empty areas in the sky and crop it to max possible size. I hope you enjoy it…!

Hawaii, to home or to beach

admin — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 06:18:08 +0000

This particular image has also been shot in Maui Island. I used my tripod and cable release to shoot 5 bracketed images of the scene with 1 EV step. I then merged the files in Photomatix and further post-processed using Lightroom and Photoshop. I tried to avoid using too much color saturation espiecially at the foreground to keep the natural look of the photo. If you pay attention to the bright regions like the small path on the left going up to home or the parts of the sand lit by sun, you may notice my gentle usage of dodge and burn tool in Photoshop. The trick here is to use the dodge to highlight the parts of the photo that you would like to focus and to use the burn tool to darken the surrounding region of the focus areas to further emphasis them.

HDR demo video (Hawaii, the sunset)

admin — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:58:00 +0000

Hi folks, I started to create a series of HDR demos videos. In this one, I used photomatix, lightroom and photoshop to get my final image. Please leave your comments.

The HDR book is on the way

admin — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 04:02:15 +0000

Good news everyone! Finally I have time to concentrate and finish my HDR book! Initially I am planning to release it only as ebook. My plans is to keep it somewhere at 40 pages. I would like to include several samples of HDR from start to finish and also some general photography tips. I am already very excited!

Karasu, The Lake Acarlar

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:37:40 +0000

This is my hometown in Turkey. I had this shot sometime ago and now I processed it. For this one I used my recent techniques to get the sky blues is and plus a touch of purple. First, when I tone mapped the image in photomatix, I made the temperature blueish -5, -6. It could be left 0 if the photo already look ok enough. I habe been using the smoothing almost at max, 10, recently. It gives more natural and better looking sky results. Then I further process the photo in photoshop. First, I max the clarity in lightroom then open it in PS. Next, I went back to lightroom, made the white balance more blueish, and again open it in PS. Now I have two photos with different white balance. I copy past the blue sky onto other one as a layer, and add a black layer mask to it, painted the sky in the layer mask white to reveal it onto other image. This is relatively an easy PS trick, I will hopefully make a video about it soon. Enjoy the photo!