The glories of Lightroom

I’m obsessed with the power of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It’s making me look at photography in a whole new way, and my older images in brand new lights. I was fiddling with some honeymoon pictures last night when I came up with this:

Pirate Ship Before and After

BEFORE | AFTER

Click through for the full Flickr files. It’s amazing what Lightroom is able to pull out of that initial image, which is a meager 5 megapixel JPG image. This is not even RAW. The clouds are brand new. The color on the mountains is new.

I’m sure if I went into Photoshop I could isolate the sky and make it more dramatic. But there’s a line there somewhere I don’t want to cross from sharpening an image to creating something that wasn’t there to begin with.


 
 
 

4 Responses to “The glories of Lightroom”

  1. Phil Foxx
    29. October 2007 at 09:51

    … wow. That’s impressive. Argh, can’t afford the software right now…

  2. Augie De Blieck Jr.
    29. October 2007 at 17:40

    Thanks, Phil. I was able to hide the cost of Lightroom as a wedding expense. We knew we were getting a couple of DVDs filled with our wedding pics and needed some way to store and sort them. Just in case we ended up with RAW files, we needed something to read them. And Lightroom was new at that point, and only $199. Now it’s back up to $300, but it’s still a very powerful program.

  3. Paul C
    29. October 2007 at 18:57

    That is pretty great work there Augie and looks to be a really great tool. The photo is very nice too, I love the ships adding something to the foreground.

  4. Augie De Blieck Jr.
    29. October 2007 at 21:28

    Thanks, Paul. I’m afraid it doesn’t conform to the Rule of Thirds, generally speaking, but given the situation and the camera I had, I think it came out nicely. Honestly, I was taking a pic of the mountain there. The pirate ship was a happy accident. That’s the glorious thing about digital photography – you get to take more shots!

    I’ll have more scenic pics from the honeymoon up on Flickr later tonight. I want to post a new pic each weekend here to the blog.