Day 7: RAW Said the Bear

Well, Week 1 is official over and done. 51 more of these bad boys left to go. Today was another RAW shooting day with some time spent in Aperture after. Let's get to it, shall we?

It snowed quite a bit in Indiana today. But it was a nice, peaceful snow. Great big, slow falling flakes. Unfortunately I was stuck at work, so that means I was limited to photos of things in the immediate vicinity of the store. Like this parking meter for example.

1/125 sec. exposure at F/5.6. ISO 100.
Click here for larger image.

The image on the left is the original, unprocessed image. This is how the image came out when I just loaded it into Aperture and spit out a JPEG.

Here are the steps I went through to get the image on the right:
1. Under White Balance I turned the Tint down from 41 to 23 and the Temperature up to 5728 K.
2. Under Levels I moved the Luminance slider to .07.
3. Moved the sliders under Curves to the position shown in the below image.

That's all I did to this image. I'm not sure what most of those things actually did to my image. I was basically moving things around and watching what it did to the image as a result. I still don't think it's anything special. I do like the redness of the brick and I think the snowflakes stand out more in the image on the right.

In the next image, I tried to shoot up at the sky. It was completely clear at this point, but was still snowing pretty heavily. I wanted to try and get the sky and the snowflakes falling, but (other than a few specks) not much is shown. So what I ended up doing with this picture in Aperture was try to get the sky a strong blue, and to enhance the golden color of the lamp. Here are the two images.

1/2000 sec. exposure at F/5.6. ISO 100.
Click here for larger image.

Once again, the image on the left is the unprocessed image and the one on the right is the resulting image after I ran it through Aperture. Here are the steps I went through for this image:

1. Moved the Curves sliders to the positions shown in the below image.

2. Turned Highlights up to 34.23. (Found under Highlights and Shadows.)

3. Under Colors, turned Yellow Saturation up to 28.5, Luminance down to -13.5 and Range down to .50.

4. Turned Blue Hue up to 32.8, Saturation up to 53.1, Luminance down to -25.3 and Range down to .50.

And that's it. As you can see, the image still has a few flecks of snow in it. The other thing you might notice is that in the original image, you could make out the image on the flag off the lamppost. Once I tweaked the image, both the post and the flag became silhouetted against everything else. I was conscious of this when I was messing with the image. It became more important for me to get the blue and gold to stand out of the image and less about keeping any other detail. What do you think? Did I make it work?

I'm not sure what I'll do for tomorrow. I really like shooting in RAW and messing around with Aperture, so no matter what I'll probably continue to do that. I don't know that I'll get into much detail with what I did in Aperture unless it's something I think is worth mentioning (i.e. I find a really cool tool in Aperture and want to share it). Still waiting for some suggestions as to what you guys want to see me shoot also! My one roommate will be home in a few days with his dog, so I'm sure she'll make it on here at some point in the future. And we're supposed to get some more snow over the next couple of days so I'd like to get out and shoot some stuff in that as well. Thanks for stopping by as always. Happy weekend!