Last year just before Christmas I took a late walk in the streets of Copenhagen with my tripod and my camera. For a long time I stood in front the entrance of the worlds second oldest amusement park: Tivoli.

It’s always incredible busy in in front of Tivoli and I really wanted a shot not too crowded with people, so I had to wait. I think I stood for 20 minutes waiting for the shots with the fewest people and allowing a long peek into the old garden. And this was what I got and I’m pretty happy with it.

However, it’s not perfect. One of the good things about taking several shots as you do in HDR, is that you get several options to merge from. In this case I had 7 different exposures ranging from –3 to +3. The longest exposure is 10 seconds, which is enough to make fast moving people disappear.

Let’s look at the untouched 0-exposureand, and see what immediate problems there is with this image:

#1: They forgot to turn on one torch (or it had blown out, it was quite windy). Fortunately this photo is symmetric, and I can just mirror it to get a torch for the right hand side, and because I have 7 images, I will be able to get a torch that is not an exact mirror of the first one.

#2: The photo is taken on a 14 mm lens, which is extremely wide angled. Things in the corners of a wide angle lens does get warped, and this drum doesn’t look good. I can’t really fix it, without some kind of compromise.

#3: The stars hanging from the roof of the main gate is swinging in the strong wind. By using one of the images with a faster shutter speed, it might be good enough for a fairly sharp star. I did try to take the photos while the wind was less intense.

#4: It’s a busy area and people are moving around. Some blurry people can look quite cool, but others looks bad in the image. The goal is to get leave the cool ones and remove the ugly ones.

#5: Because this shot is shot with a wide angled lens that is tipped slightly upwards, the buildings leans. Sometimes this looks cool, but in this photo it’s not particular flattering. However, I will be in trouble when I start fixing it, because of the drum on the soldier. But more about that later.

Making the tone mapped image

First I merged the 7 shots in Photomatix Pro (by the way I just found out that there is a Photomatix Essentials. As far as I can see this gives you less artistic options, which I really can’t recommend if you want to do more artistic HDR photos).

There is a lot of dynamic light in this photo, because of all of the lights and the really dark sky and shadows. It’s difficult to capture all light, for that reason I shot from –3 to +3.

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To create this photo I have used the clone healing brush and the perspective crop in Photoshop.  It is a 7 shot HDR photo, and I used Photomatix pro, to create both a single tone mapped image and a double tone mapped image, which I mixed with the original ones.

The original photo is not a bad one, but neither perfect.

#1: I removed the branches. When I straighten the church, some disappeared, but I ended up removing them completely. When I took the shot, made sure, that they were included and did not cover the church. I used the brush healing tool in Photoshop.

#2 The sky I worked with, to emphasize the light in the mist. That is an important part of the mood. I increased the contrast and saturation a bit.

#3 The church I straighten to a certain level. I can’t straighten it completely, because it makes a small fat church, which is not the reality. The compromise is somewhere in between completely straightened and this. Ideally I would have gone further away, but that was not possible.

#4 The acid color of the light from these lamp posts I didn’t like, so I worked with the colors, and mixed that into my final photo. I did that, by making a new layer in Photoshop, opened the Hue/Saturation dialog (CTRL+U) and dialed back some of the yellow and green. I then mixed the lamps into my image.

#5 These lamps are blown out, but because I shot it in HDR I can achieve the moody great look from the lamps, in stead of just a white blob. There is not a lot of dynamic light in this photo otherwise, but the lamps I save.

#6 I then used more healing brush to remove the snow. I used a clone stamp after wards to get a better result on the cobble stones.

#7 The cobble stones is the double tone mapped image. What I get from the double tone mapped image, is the lovely reflections from the lamps and the many details and textures in the cobble stones.

This is one of the photos, where you might ask “Why HDR it?” – well, I did get more details within the windows of the church and on the lamps. I also got more shots, so that I could remove people and the car coming around the corner. And then it added some of the magic, mysterious Jack the Ripper mood.

This winter lasted a long time, but now spring has finally arrived. During the winter time I have had many opportunities to photograph ice in the fiords around Roskilde. This particular day I ventured out on the ice with a tripod and two cameras. It’s a very shallow part of the fiord and should I have gone through the ice I would have been in to the knees, no more than that. The ice does funny things around the rocks. It looks like small frozen vulcanos. There are many rocks in this area, and I  shot a few of them.

About the post-processing

I have had some problems trying to get the ice look good. Ice is basically grey’ish, maybe with a blue tint, but is not that colorful. However, when the colors of the sky reflect in the ice, you can get a little color out of it. My project has been to get some intensity out of of the ice, while still believing that it is ice. Ice is blue and the mind accepts it to be blue.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo, but to make the final photo I have used two different images I made in Lightroom from the 0-exposure and one I made in Photomatix Pro.

This is the original 0 exposure photo:

As you can see a flat and dull photo and certainly not reflecting the reality. But you can also see that almost everything is visible. There are no completely blown out areas of white, neither is there any pitch black areas. This means that there is not a lot of dynamic light in this scenery and no real need for HDR software like Photomatix, but Photomatix not only assembles several exposures into one High Dynamic Range image, it also does some post-processing of the image. The post-processing can also be applied to single photos and give really great results. In this case I had 5 different exposures, and I used them all, simply to get a better quality of image in the shadows, but I could have used just this single photo.

#1 The sky is dull. I started playing around with the sky in Lightroom and exported two different versions of the 0-exposure, and I anticipated that I would use one of those two skies in the final image. I made a beautiful one and then I did a more dramatic one. I made the two in Lightroom, because Photomatix often makes a grey’ish sky, and that does not look good. This is something I have learned over the past couple of months and come to realize, that Lightroom is pretty for making gorgeous skies. In this case, however, I was tricked – Photomatix did the best sky.

#2 The area with the golden colors reflecting in the sky has to come more alive. I did that by amp’ing up the saturation and by adding a little softness to area.

#3 Clean up. I do it every time and it makes a difference! It really does. Try and compare. In this case I used the Lasso select tool in Photoshop CS6 and then pressed SHIFT+F5 for a content aware fill. In some situations it does amazing work. And then I used the Healing Brush remove a larger number of stones and ice peckles both close the Rock and further out in the distance. This does take some time, but it is worth the effort!

This is the first of my images exported from Lightroom. You can see three horizontal lines. That is a Gradient filter. The effect starts from the lower line and reaches the maximum effect at the top line.

In the right hand side, you can see the settings for the Gradient in the top section. In this case I ded a fine tuning of my global changes. The global changes you find in the section below (the middle one you can see). In the middle section you can see how I simulate HDR in Lightroom. This is done by lowering the Highlights to -100 and raising the Shadows to +98 (or 100). This gives a flat HDR looking photo, but by adding some contrast and clarity things starts looking really good. I amp’ed up the saturation too, to get a great looking sky. The Black and Whites I also adjusted a little bit to add a little more punch the image.

The second image I generated from Lightroom is a more dramatic one. As you maybe can see, some of the ice from this image, is in final image. The sky from this image I didn’t use.

And below is my image from Photomatix Pro. I found a really nice processing in the “Exposure Fusion” and “Method: Fusion/Natural”. I have some presets that I use and then I adjust them a bit, when I find something that I like.

In this case the sky turned out really nice and I ended up using this sky. I also blended the Ice with the second image, giving a more blue color to the ice.

These three images I loaded into Photoshop as layers, along with the five original shots, giving me all together 8 layers. I then started mixing the final image, by using layered masks (see my tutorial on blending layers in Adobe Photoshop here). As it turned out, I never used anything from the original shots in the final image, but only from the three images displayed here.

One day after work I went out to shoot some photos. I was thinking of shooting the Opera House in Copenhagen. But on my way I passed the Eastern High Court of Denmark and saw the shadows from the gate, and I shot those instead of the Opera House.

Shooting the photo

My idea was to use the shadows as lead in lines and I really liked the color of the sky along with colors of the building. Preferable I would have liked to have door a little further to the left in the image, but a car was there and I couldn’t really get it to work. I tried several different compositions until suddenly the gates opened and I gave up doing more shots. I tried a couple of shots with the open gates, but it didn’t work.

The photo I took close to the ground on a small Manfrotto table tripod with an extension. With the extension fully extended it gets a little unsteady, but it is usable. I always have that one with me, if I don’t have one my full size tripods with me. Careful when you use such a small tripod in such a busy area, people are prone to kick your camera like a football, because they don’t see it.

The idea of going close to the ground, is to make the lines appear stronger, and the have less dead space from the road.

About the processing

This is the original shot, here you can see the tip of the car and a bit more of the road. That is too much of the street, but I could go into the street, because it was quite busy. The street it also way too yellow, and there is a nasty lens flare.

This is my primary post-processing to the photo done in Adobe Lightroom 4. I use Lightroom a lot and find that I can do so many things with it. Most of the post-processing I did to the photo is done in Lightroom, only the perspective crop and the the clean up in the photo is done in Photoshop. It looks like, that Lightroom 5 will allow me to get that done within Lightroom too.

I originally intended the photo to be an HDR, but it appeared not to contain a whole lot of Dynamic light, so I only did a standard post-processing to the photo, using the 0 EV version of the photo.

Lets run through the settings.

Exposure: I lowered it ever so slightly with -0.36 EV step to get the image just a little darker and more moody.

Contrast: This I raised to make shadows on the street appear more prominent.

Highlights: The slider affects the bright areas in the photo and either makes them lighter or darker. This I lowered to amp down the strong light from the lamp.

Shadows: Works like highlights, only it works on the shadows. I also lowered this to get the shadows on the street to become stronger. It is not that often I lower the shadows, but in this case I did it intentionally.

Clarity: This I raised to get more grittiness in the street and more texture in the building. It is a very potent slider and you should handle it with care.

Tone curve section: Here I adjusted two parts of the highlight area, I raised the Highlights a little again and but lowered the lights. How does these work compared to Highlights in the section above? The tone curve allows you to do more detailed adjustments, and they are applied on top of the settings. I often end up using both the slides both in the top section and in the Tone Curve section. Tone curve can add a more controlled contrast to the image. I use the slides, even though I could drag the curve around. I find that I can work the sliders in a more controlled way, than moving around the curve with my mouse..

HSL section:  This section I really use a lot too tweak colors in the photo. In this case I removed all yellow saturation and lowered the orange. There is yellow in orange, but Lightroom is clever enough only to remove the yellow. So I got rid of my yellow street, but kept my orange building. In a later final touch step I removed all saturation in the street, to get it completely grey.

In Photoshop CS6 I did:

#1 Remove nasty flare. I did that with a combination of content aware fill and clone stamping until it looked nice.

#2 I then did my usual clean up. Some might argue, that the stuff really was there, and therefore it should also be there in the photo. I find that the images a better and stronger image by taking my time to remove the rubble and signs on the wall and gates. I’m not making a portrait of reality, but I am making a photo.

#3 I cropped the photo in a way to avoid the large square in the lower right hand corner, but keeping the sewer cover in the left corner. And then I straighten the image a bit, using perspective crop. I did that to get rid of the building on the left, with loosing my sewer cover.