Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque at Night

Switching to a Mac

On Saturday I bought a MacBook Pro. I’d been threatening to switch from PC to Mac for a while now. Those D800 files are big enough, but pile them on top of each other, along with a few adjustment layers and luminosity masks, and they quickly become a burden to the system. My MacBook handles these workflows a lot better than my laptop.

And, of course, I love the retina display.

But I feel like I’m learning to ride a bike again, especially with photo editing. I’ve calibrated the monitor blindly (without a calibration tool). The MacBook has naturally more contrast, and a warmer temperature to my laptop (most PCs are typically cool), so I edited a few test photos yesterday on the Mac and viewed them on my laptop, and the results are surprising.

Essentially, I’m attempting to get the same results on my Mac as I did with my laptop, with the same type of editing, but I wasn’t having success. On the Mac, the images look good, but on my laptop, they were too blue, and with very little contrast.

I’ve changed my processing style now, to compensate for the differences. I’ll be paying closer attention to image temperature and the histogram until editing on the Mac becomes more natural for me. With these changes, I’ve been very happy with the standard of images I’ve produced on the Mac this morning.

Any experienced Mac users with any tips for a newbie, I will be glad to hear them 😀

Update:  After constant crashes while using Photoshop (Display Driver issue), I’ve sent the Macbook back and awaiting the results. Not a great start.

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How I Created The Image – Before/After Post-Processing

Workflow Explanation – Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque

Would you like to learn my post-processing techniques? Feel free to check out my course: The Art of Digital Blending & The Art of Cityscape Photography

It’s a rare day when I include a person in my images. But this gentlemen proved to be the ideal foreground element for this image. I was shooting long exposures (20 seconds), to reduce the number of people in the frame.

This fella was standing in the left of the frame initially, with his friend. After I shot a few exposures, he walked to this spot and started texting. I had just opened the shutter when he did this, so although I knew that him being there would enhance the image, I thought that there was no chance he would stand still enough for a 20 second exposure to capture him.

As soon as the shutter closed again, he walked away. I checked the image and was pleasantly surprised to see he was relatively in focus. It must have been a very important text message to have captured his attention so intently.

In order to create a tourist-free scene, I layered three exposures and blended them, using the method found here: How to Remove Tourists From Your Photos

Then I expanded the image canvas by choosing the Crop tool and instead of cropping in, I dragged outward, thus creating space around the image. I did this so that after correcting the perspective distortion in Photoshop, nothing would be pushed out the frame, and cropped out automatically.

In Lens Corrections, I corrected much of the perspective distortion and then cropped the image down until I was happy.

The challenge of this image was separating the man in the foreground, from everything else. As you can see in the original image, it’s a little difficult to separate him from the ground. I had to make him stand out. I considered two ways of doing this. Either I could make him brighter in relation to the floor, or make him darker, and brighten the floor up. I tried both options, and settled on the first one; brightening him up.

One of the elements I wanted to emphasise here, was the reflection of the mosque walls and lights in the shiny floor. I did this with a combination of Nik Color Efex Pro Contrast filter, a Levels layer, and dodging and burning. For each layer, I masked out the man so he wasn’t affected.

Once I had darkened the floor and dodged the highlights in the floor, I then applied a Levels layer to the man, to brighten him up a touch. I zoomed in and slowly masked around him. Thanks to the Wacom pressure sensitive pen, that wasn’t too much of a challenge.

I applied a Detail Enhancer layer from my Easy Panel, on the centre part of the wall, where the light patterns are, just to give them more life. I then added a moon from a shot I took about 2 years ago. And finally, I finished with a soft vignette around the image.