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I’ve recently (by recently we’re talking Saturday) started using Adobe Lightroom in place of Google Picasa for my post processing. It’s helped me knock another peeve from the Zooomr site in that from now on my photos will have their camera information uploaded with them.

Also I have had my first chance to play with RAW images thanks to Brian Auer’s current project – which is to take a photo and edit it to make it better (you can see other people’s attempts at the project here).

So here’s the original image (which is fully copyrighted to Brian) and my stab at it

Now you may ask why I’ve removed two thirds of the photo, but I felt it better to concentrate the image on the bird (it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my first three attempts look like the attempts from HitKaiser, Ron McCoy and Jim M. Goldstein ! :) )

So what’s RAW? Well here’s the benefits over JPG from the Wikipedia article

• Finer control is easier for the settings when a mouse and keyboard are available to set them. For example, the white point can be set to any value, not just discrete values like “daylight” or “incandescent”.
• The settings can be previewed and tweaked to obtain the best quality image or desired effect. (With in-camera processing, the values must be set before the exposure). This is especially pertinent to the white balance setting since color casts can be difficult to correct after the conversion to RGB is done.
• Camera raw files have 12 or 14 bits of intensity information, not the gamma-compressed 8 bits typically stored in processed TIFF and JPEG files; since the data are not yet rendered and clipped to a color space gamut, more precision may be available in highlights, shadows, and saturated colors.
• The working color space can be set to whatever is desired.

Thanks to it being a raw image I could change the photo with much greater detail than the JPG image. I could amend the white balance and exposure with true precision, pulling the exposure up a touch along with the recovery, blacks and fill light.

I was able to tint the camera calibration by pulling down all of the colours and their saturation and pulling up the red turning the image into a nice golden orange (as well as straightening the image a whole 0.3 degrees to flatten the surf as a horizon). The bird not invites you to question what could be out of sight (if you ignore that you’ve already seen the rest of the photo).