It’s Friday once again so I decided to process another Be Our Guest Wishes shot for Fireworks Friday. This was my first time attempting Wishes from this location but it went really well. I like the added bonus of not having a thousand people hovering right around me so that I actually have some elbow room.
Shooting & Editing Be Our Guest Wishes
This was shot with the Nikon D810 and Nikon 14-24 2.8. I also used a Progrey 7-stop ND filter. This is one of the more complicated fireworks shots for me when it comes to post processing. I shoot a bracket with no fireworks and then shoot the fireworks separately. I chose 2 exposure to make my base blend for the foreground. I then color corrected Beast’s Castle to eliminate the horrible blue color cast it has. Even though I’ve done this many times now it still takes a bit of time to get just right. Once this was completed I blended in my fireworks shot to the sky. From this point I start doing some light painting to blend the two images together better. The fireworks put different casts on the foreground depending on their color. Painting this in really ups the realism factor. Once this is done I used Nik Color Efex Pro Contrast followed by targeted levels adjustments using luminosity masks. I made several targeted hue/saturation adjustments and then denoised the sky. I did some final light painting to finish up the blending and then finished the shot off with sharpening.