Lightning 5-27-2010

[AMRA]

I took about 80 pictures this evening from my home office window. Several had little streamers of lightning in them but one of them…. Just wow! 😯

The original shot resized down to about 20% of original size.

And then the same image cropped and resized.

[orionid]

And because I can’t leave well enough alone, and because it looked awesome as is and I really wanted to see what would happen, I went ahead and contrast/curve/detail/saturation enhanced it for you. I hope you don’t mind.

PS: This could look really flippin sweet if you applied the same treatments to the RAW file instead of JPEG.

[AMRA]

That’s pretty cool looking. Hope ya don’t mind that I saved it. 😉

I don’t have my camera setup to shoot RAW. I’m not that savvy when it comes to photo editing. I still use Paint Shop Pro 8 but it crashes all the time on my new rig using Windows 7.

Maybe I should start shooting RAW instead, I dunno.

[orionid]

Nope. Don’t mind at all.

We’ve had a lot of discussion in other parts of the forum concerning RAW vs. JPEG. You should check it out sometime. There’s also good freeware graphics editors like Gimp and Irfanview (although I haven’t personally used either of them, others have and can attest).

[ravnostic]

Irfanview is an excellent basic editor; I’ve used to for years; it’s dependable, allows all sorts of conversions (R->G->B, color to B/W, jpeg to tiff or gif or bmp and plenty of others.) Until I figured out I got better software from my camera manufacturer (thanks to this group, btw), I was pretty damned pleased with it. Not so much anymore, but as a starter (and free as in no spyware or viruses) program, I recommend it. I took the liberty of tweeking it with Irfanview, and came up with this:

[caradoc]

Nice! Lightning’s one of my favorite subjects…

[Author]

Posts