Here is one classic Pompei shot with Vesuvius in the back. Midday sun, crowds all over the place, too bright sky, poor contrast:
Cropping (in Camera Raw) allows focusing on the center temple and eliminates the worst part of the crowd:
Here is the Raw conversion: mainly tone curve for added contrast, graduated filter to pull back the sky and adjustment brush to bring back top of the building and columns that were too dark after the grad filter:
Here are the histograms before (left) and after (right):
One final clone tool in Photoshop removes the unwanted visitors. Voilá:
Posted in POTN here.
I am often asked why I shoot my photographs in RAW format. RAW capture refers to the direct transfer of the information acquired by the sensor of a digital camera to the memory card without any in-camera processing. In the 18-megapixel Canon EOS 7D, this translates into files of 25MB, compared to the 6MB of a high-resolution JPG-compressed file. Why would one like to shoot RAW files? The RAW format contains all the information captured by the sensor and is therefore most amenable to corrections of exposure, saturation, chromatic aberrations and noise during post-processing. Compressed JPG files contain a reduced amount of information and so are much more limited to adjust during post-processing. Why would someone want to adjust a photograph? Shown below are three examples taken during a recent trip to the Otavalo valley in Northern Ecuador. In all cases, the top image is straight-out-of-camera, while the lower image is after conversion in Adobe CS4 Camera Raw (no Photoshop in any of these examples!). Read more...
Science, Jazz, Photography
