Before and After

The owner of sweetrun.blogspot.com had asked me a question about some my pictures.  Such as, what kind of lenses I use and do I use filters.   I listed a couple of my lenses and told her that in my opinion a polarizing filter was essential to a camera kit.  I also said that Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop play a part in the final look of an image and that I would post a before and after of a photo from a previous post.

The top photo is the raw image straight out of the camera.  I developed it in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and sent it to Photoshop for some final touches to get the "after" on the bottom photo.  I know that probably sounds like a lot of work, but it only took me a couple of minutes to get the final look I remembered seeing that evening.

The main things I did to the photo were to add some clarity, sharpening, contrast and saturation and work on the sky exposure a little.  All that took was moving some sliders and working with a brush on the sky 'til I got it to where I wanted it.  Learning to use Lightroom and Photoshop is far harder than actually using them.  Once you have the basics figured out you can really buzz through some photos.

As an aside, the photos in this post were shot in jpeg format and looked like that straight out of the camera.  The camera did the processing for me.  The raw file is like the camera saying, "here's your photo, I'm not going to mess with it.  You can do whatever you want to with it".