Before and After

Next up in the Before and After series.  Once again featuring a photo taken in February of 2010 on Abraham Lake.  The top photo is the unedited RAW file.   To start the editing process I simply clicked the 'Paste Settings from Previous' tab in Lightroom to see how much of the editing done on yesterday's photo was recyclable.  Some of it was - most the colour renditions - but everything else was a do over.  I wanted the final photo to have normal 12 x 18 proportions in portrait format.  There's a 'hot spot in the upper area of the photo that needed to be recovered and I had to mess around a bit to get the contrast in the ice to look the way I wanted.

RAW files almost always look very flat and dull.  They are to digital photography what negatives were to the world of film photography; useless as a standalone but a vital tool to producing spectacular photograph.