RAW Collection

I have been back in the UK about a month now and I have been slowly working through a mountain of photos. Its been a slow task and to be honest one I have been avoiding as I await a now toy.

When you work through any number of photos you should have a good work flow. I browse my pictures in Adobe Bridge. It has a 5 star rating system and filter so you can mark your best photos as such and reject the bad ones. It also has a review mode which which helps select the good (or bad) shots quickly.

Once I have rejected the bad ones I set about tweaking the good ones. For this I use Camera Raw which has a few advantages. Its quicker to load and less memory intensive than Photoshop on my ageing laptop. It also allows you to save the changes in a sidecar file (a .xmp file) leaving the image intact and unaltered leaving you free to revert to the original or make further changes.

I am impressed with the power of this little program. I have used it a lot in the past to correct dodgy horizons but it also has the usual tools such as crop, spot and red-eye  removal and graduated filter. The toolbar on the left of the screen can be used to boost colour saturation, adjust highlights through to shadows and much more.  Here is an example of what Camera Raw can do.

I took this picture of Monkey Temple in Kathmandu from the roof of our accommodation, the Kathmandu Garden House, using a 300mm lens. This was the clearest view I could get of the Temple from the rooftop. Moving to my right it was obscured by water tanks and I could not move further to the left. Kathmandu does have air pollution problems and I knew this would make the shot hazy and washed out.

Back at home I cropped the photo to remove the bits of building and the black water tank. I then set about trying to bring out the colours. The auto mode made a slight improvement and from there I altered the exposure, increased the blacks by a large amount and also increased the contrast. The final settings I used are show to the right.

This is the final image. As you can see the haze is reduced and the photo looks less washed out. You can make out the hills in the background and with the clutter removed you eyes are not distracted from the mian object.

I recently discovered the world of Tilt shift photography which can be used to get photos the impression they are on the macro scale when infact they are much larger. Normally this is done by using an expensive lens but the same effect can be acheived by software or by going to Tiltshiftmaker.com

The pictures below were created at Tiltshiftmaker.com and the pictures were taken during my trip to Nepal in April 2006. The website seems to work well and is a lot cheaper than a purpose built tilt shift lens. Check it out.