OK, so a week or so ago I posted the picture of the water drops on the sepia coloured rose. I've kind of decided not to use that picture for the water round of the competition. (Not because I don't like it, more because it's a rose bud with water rather than water on a rose bud).

... Anyhow, I was playing with the picture in Photoshop and decided to raise the exposure of the right side before removing the highlights from the water droplets to see what effect it had on the picture. It's left me in a dilemma about which I prefer.

 

So, which is better?

OK, so technically it's the same old boat from Cruit Island as before, but I was playing and thought I'd share.

This has fallen foul of my current fascination. Graduated filters in Lightroom 2. Well worth investing in or using the demo if you can get it.

The following thumbnail gives you an idea of the picture before the filters were applied. (Sorry, didn't bother uploading the full size version of it).

Now, as you can probably tell, the original image suffered from the usual problems encountered (by me anyway) on a bright day in that it was left very washed out and feeling flat.

Adding a filter to the top right, running down to the middle of the picture in a diagonal has allowed the sky to come back into its own. A few other tweaks to curves and general contrast and exposure and hopefully things look a little better.

Now, lets be honest. It was never a great picture to start with, but I made all these changes in about 10 minutes. (Less time than it took to knock together this post).

The simplicity of Lightroom 2 is just fantastic.

I'm really going to have to pull my pennies together to get that Macro lens I mentioned. I can already see just how addictive taking that sort of picture could be.


(no exif information for you right now...)

One thing to note in this picture is that rather than make some tweaks in Lightroom myself to fix up contrast etc, I made use of a preset. Lightroom provides a number of "out of the box" presets which, while interesting, can be quite limited. However, there are a large number of presets available on the web (both charged for and free). these can have quite an effect on your image.

I'm not sure that using a preset isn't some form of cardinal sin - after all every image should be treated as a new challenge and one size probably shouldn't fit all. However, as a starting point (or if you like the effect), they can be really useful and give some impressive results.

One of the best preset selections I played with so far were referenced on ReallyJapans blog (kudos to him for sharing the find). You can find them here from the original author Kim Long (thanks to her for sharing them so generously).