We generally leave the TV on when we’re reading or cooking or what have you, with the TV playing … pictures from our Flickr. As a consequence, I end up examining photos and really really wishing I knew more, back then. For example, this photo. It’s a manually-done HDR, which means I mixed 3 images together to get it.
I looked at that going by and I thought, “I wonder what that would look like if I reworked it?” So I pulled the raw images, reset all of the settings in Canon, rendered out 3 tiffs, ran Photomatix, and here we go.
Now, is it better? In some ways, and in some ways not. I suspect that I don’t really know what I’m doing with Photomatix any more, and this is the version with all of the advanced features, so … we’ll see. On the other hand, the phone does a better job maybe. And on yet another hand, I now know how easy it is to go back and adjust, and I have all the raw materials, so … if they’re particularly egregious, maybe I’ll fix them.
Happy New Year!
-D
I’ve really gotten into Lightroom. The radial filter would be perfect for this photo. Over time, I’ve purchased some excellent presets and play around with the variety of choices noticing the settings used for certain edits–like the difference in adjusting shadows v. blacks, or exposure v. brightness, and highlights v. whites. It’s really helped when photos seem beyond help even though I was careful with my camera settings to begin with.
Still, it’s a nice photo in a lovely setting. Send me the RAW and I’ll see what I can do if you’d like.