Few days ago I was going through my photo trash bin and stumbled upon this shot:

D300 + Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8, ISO 640, F/8, 1/80

It was taken in the Lettuce Lake park on a dull winder evening, during the season when local nature almost goes “black and white” for a couple of months :) Actually, I sort of trashed the entire series from that night because there was absolutely no mood in any of the photos I brought home that day. Anyways, I was comparing Capture NX2 performance to its older version and this photo was my guinea pig.

Opened it in Capture NX, switched Picture Control to Vivid, bumped up overall Color Saturation, dropped a control point to the green grass, increased brightness and saturation, dropped another one to the yellowish lit trees, increased their brightness and saturation, and finally dropped a control point onto the water, cranked up contrast and brightness (making it look a lot crispier and almost frostier :) Sharpened the entire photo and saved as JPEG. Overall, took me about a minute or two.

The result was impressively unexpected… I think 75 degrees warm florida winter evening turned into a beautiful autumn landscape, depicting early November morning with crispy cold air (40F? :) and almost frozen water (should have tossed some ice in there :)

Here it is:

Click on each image to see x-Large version.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.