R. Doug Wicker — Author

First came Friday evening with it’s spectacular sunset.  Then, not to be outdone, Saturday evening arrived with yet another great show.

All shots were made in camera raw and post processed in Picasa.  Tweaks were made to increase contrast and add a little color saturation (but not much—didn’t need it).  A few shots were slightly cropped.  A few more had graduated tinting done to highlight the sky.  Color balancing was left at daylight for most shots, but I did cool down the sky in some shots to bring out the blues.

And here are the results:

In June of 2007 I and a group of fellow shutterbugs joined a professional photographer for a photo safari of downtown El Paso.  My particular mission was to capture unique angles, architectural details, and vibrant colors.

So, to maximize post-processing control I set my Canon EOS 5D to capture the images in raw.  The camera itself was taken out of program mode, and white balance was manually set to match the lighting conditions encountered in each shot.

The resulting raw images were processed using Google’s free Picasa photo editing software, then converted into the JPEGs you see below.

And the point of all this?  You don’t have to go to exotic locales to produce exotic-looking photographs.  Many opportunities reside right in you home town.

We enjoyed a really dramatic sky on Monday, made more so by the sunlight shining in the foreground against the backdrop of ominously dark clouds.  Snatching my camera, I took the opportunity to snap a few shots from the backyard, and then later went out to the front yard to get some shots of the Franklin Mountains.  These pictures were taken in raw format, and then post-processed using Google’s free Picasa photo editing software.

The tweaks I used included:  In the Commonly Used Fixes Menu—I started with either the I’m Feeling Lucky or Auto Contrast selections followed on some photos with Straighten and Crop; Under Finely-Tuned Lighting and Color Fixes—Color Temperature and Fill Light were tuned;  Moving on to the Fun and Useful Image Processing—I mildly increased the Saturation of most of these shots, and then on all of them I used Graduated Tint to emulate a graduated neutral density filter.  This final step darkened and added even more drama to the already cloudy backgrounds and increased the bluish tint of any sky showing through the cloud layer and above the mountains.

Total time spent in post-processing was considerably less than half an hour.  It’s just simply amazing what you can do with this free software package and a little experimentation.