Untouched and Touched

I didn't bring my Nikon with me today when I took Kane to the athletic complex because I was planning on working on the "Come" command with him.

I thought, why bother bringing my big camera when I already spent 2 hours a few days ago taking pix?

Well, the dramatic cloud formations that were present today taught me that even though I may have thought that I have taken all the pix possible at one particular location, that Mother Nature still had some surprises up her sleeve.

There were these dramatic clouds with rain on the horizon, and all I had with me was my cell phone camera. The cell phone camera isn't too shabby as far as cell phone cameras go, but it simply doesn't compare to my Nikon D-80 SLR.

This is a raw, untouched photo that I took with my cell phone.

This is the same photo after I rotated it slightly and applied a tone curve to make it lighter.

Now you see that in making the image lighter, the foreground has more detail. But in having the foreground gain that detail, detail - plus the drama - was sacrificed in the clouds above.

Now we're going to do a very simple exercise in High Dynamic Range (HDR).

I took the original untouched cell phone camera photo. Then I made a duplicate of that image. So, I had 2 identical image layers sitting one on top of the other.

I applied the tone curve to the top layer in order to lighten up the foreground. Then I erased the clouds from the top layer so that the original dark clouds from the bottom layer would show through.

Can you see the difference?

We have the dramatic clouds from the original combined with the lightened foreground of the duplicate layer.

Now, just for the hell of it, I applied the tone curve to the bottom, original image layer. But instead of making the image lighter, I made it darker. The result? More drama.

Now let's rotate the final image to make the horizon line straight.

Isn't photo-editing great?