Benz World Blog » Nile

Swimming Pyramids

Jason Benz — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:12:00 +0000

This was created by compositing three separate images. The Pyramids of Egypt, The Seas of Dahab and Rutland Water. Many adjustment layers and masks were needed in an attempt to balance the shot as each component was taken with different lighting conditions at different angles with different cameras in different countries.

Nile Fishing

Jason Benz — Sun, 08 May 2011 11:32:45 +0000

This was taken near Luxor in Egypt. The image was processed using Photoshops Camera RAW developer. The effect was created using the inbuilt split toning feature in Camera RAW. You access the panel by clicking on the icon which looks like an = sign after you open your RAW file. It’s useful to know when adjusting the saturation slider it acts just like an opacity slider. You can blend it between original image colour and the hues you have set for the highlights and shadows. The balance slider is really a midpoint. It defines the crossover between highlight and shadow. In this case a warm hue was added to the highlights to give the effect of sunset. A subtle blue was added to the shadows. Finally a vignette was added.

Nile Boats

Jason Benz — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:10:14 +0000

This was shot on the Nile in Egypt. Instead of using Split Toning Actions in Photoshop I used the split toning in Camera RAW. The advantage of this method is it gives you a lot of flexibility over the controls. Not only can you fine tune the Hue of the Highlights and Shadows you can also adjust the Saturation and Balance.

Luxor Sunrise

Jason Benz — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:35:10 +0000

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

Nile Skyline

Jason Benz — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:07:03 +0000

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

Aswan Panorama

Jason Benz — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:28:48 +0000

This is the river Nile in Aswan, Egypt. I wanted to create a spot colour effect with the Blues and Greens. Instead of making a mask I used a black and white layer with a duplicate image above set to Lighter Color blend mode. Then all you need to do is move any of the six colour sliders to fade that colour in and out of saturation. It is far quicker that creating a mask and I think the results look more natural.

Cairo Night

Jason Benz — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:01:13 +0000

It is against the law to take photos of military installations, government buildings and infrastructure in Egypt. For me the sight of dozens of armed police in the streets around every large building is enough of a deterrent for me. I thought I would be safe by visiting the roof bar of the Nile Hilton hotel in Cairo. After 10 minutes of taking images the general manager of the hotel approached us and said someone from the central government building had seen me and I must stop taking pictures and leave immediately. He was so insistent, I suspect the intelligence agents were still in the hotel and wanted to see where we would go. This was the last shot I got before I was stopped.