a30 September 2014

Photomatix Essentials 4.0 is out

Photomatix Essentials 4.0 is out

Photomatix Essentials, a smaller brother of Photomatix Pro, has been just updated to version 4.0! You can find more on its page.

This new version adds a lot of features and changes and here are just the most important of them:
  • Addition of new tone-mapping method: Contrast Optimizer which produces realistic & natural looking images. If you follow my work - this is tone-mapping method I recently use 90% of time.
  • Addition of Step 3 window in which users can now apply contrast adjustments and sharpening prior to saving the image.
  • Addition of option to refresh preview continuously as slider moves (64-bit version only).
  • Addition of Preview checkbox in Step 2 that allows comparing tone-mapped/fused image to the original one.
  • GUI overhaul for better user experience :)
You can get Photomatix Essentials 4.0 as well as full list of changes from HDRsoft website. If you bought earlier version of Photomatix Essentials in the past, this upgrade will be free of charge for you.
Photomatix Essentials 4.0

Daily photo - Under the Bridge

Today photo was taken during sunset in Warsaw near Grot-Rowecki's Bridge. It's a HDR from 7 exposures, tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro using Contrast Optimizer processing method (this method has been just added to Photomatix Essentials 4!).
Under the bridge

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a22 September 2014

Colourful sunset

7000 downloads of HDR tutorial eBook

Despite the fact my free HDR tutorial eBook was released almost a year ago, it's still doing pretty well. It has just reached 7000 downloads! And the numbers are still growing so in a few months it should finally reach 10k downloads :)

If you haven't read it yet, you can get it here.

Daily photo - Colourful sunset

Today I would like to share HDR landscape photo taken last year in Masuria, Poland.
Colourful sunset

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a16 September 2014

2 New wallpapers

2 new wallpapers

Few months have passed since I updated Wallpapers section for the last time so today I uploaded two new wallpapers there. They are both forest scenes, both taken in autumn in different regions of Poland: upper one in gorgeous Masuria lake region and bottom one in Tatra mountains in southern Poland.

To download either of wallpapers, click on its thumbnail to open full-resolution image, right-click it and select Save from context menu.

I hope you like them! For more free HD wallpapers from me, visit the Wallpapers section on this blog.

A lot of work

As you have probably noticed updates to my blog are much less frequent in the last few weeks. It's because I'm very busy right now (it's not only because of job but also other things I have to take care of at the moment) and this will probably be the same for the next couple of weeks but hopefully not too long. After that time, however, I should have more time to share new content & tips here. And to take more photos as last few months were rather poor in this regard.

Daily photo - Red leaf

Time for another autumn shot :)
Red leaf

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a9 September 2014

Colours of autumn

Daily photo - Colours of autumn

Time for another autumn shot - is there anything more typical for autumn than a colourful leaf and a mushroom?
Colours of autumn

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a5 September 2014

Autumn light

Daily photo - Autumn light

Today I would like to share one more autumn photo from last year (fortunately autumn is just around the corner so I hope to capture some nice images soon). Taken in Tatra mountains it features very warm light and some nice autumn colours.
Autumn in Tatra mountains

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a3 September 2014

Post-processing Wednesday: Catedral de la Almudena

before after

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 finished image after using Photomatix Pro 5 and Photoshop CC.

Try it yourself!

Starting today I will occassionally share my source images for you to try. They aren't RAWs (just to protect my copyright a little bit) and are downscaled to 2048 x 1365 pixels but you should still be able to play with them.

Here are the images.

If you do process those images, make sure to share your results in the comments on my blog. I'd be very interested in learning how you edited them!

One tip: the images were taken hand-held, so make sure to use alignment in your HDR tool.

About source images

Today photo was taken in Catedral de la Almudena in Madrid, Spain. I shot this image hand-held using very high ISO (3200) as I wanted it to be proof of concept for the post that high ISO is no longer a bad thing.

You can read more about the image itself in the mentioned post.

As you can see in the Before photo above, shadow areas are almost completely black lacking any detail. Highlights look generally quite ok with the exception of the altar which is a bit overexposed. So to solve both issues I decided to capture HDR image and for that purpose I took 3 exposures at 2.0 EV spacing.

You can see all exposures below. Starting from top-left they are: middle-exposure, under-exposed photo and over-exposed photo:
Bracketed photos in Lightroom

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 Adobe Lightroom.

As the images were taken at high ISO I expected there to be some noise, so I set Luminance Noise to 25 in the Noise Reduction panel.

I also applied lens corrections in Lens Corrections tab by checking both Enable Profile Corrections (to get rid of vignetting and distortions) and Remove Chromatic Aberration settings.

After that I exported all my source images to Photomatix Pro using Photomatix Lightroom Export Plugin.

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a1 September 2014

Gradient in the sky

Daily photo - Gradient in the sky

Today I would like to share high dynamic range image I took in Mexico during late sunset. What I like most about this image is transition from cold blue tones in the top-left and bottom-right corner to warm orange and yellows in the top-right corner of the frame.

If you would like to learn how to create such images yourself, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial.
Gradient in the sky

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