027•366 • 2016 • Colusa National Wildlife Refuge

January 27, 2016 • Leave a Comment

Things are peaceful at one of our local National Wildlife Refuges. Well, except for the waterfowl, they were quite noisy.

Took my photo mentee, Coby, on our annual photo trips to the local National Wildlife Refuges to photograph the birds.

Below are 3 different examples of this image, which helps illustrate the reason I always shoot RAW. Sometimes an image is great SOOC and sometimes you gotta massage it a little bit. I'm a fairly light handed post processing guy as I come from the days of shooting positive film where you have to get it right in the camera. But when you do have to massage an image, a RAW image file is a must. You simply can't do what I did with a JPEG image file.

My Lightroom 6 Processing is pretty straight forward for this image. Change camera profile to Landscape, change white balance to shade to warm up sunset colors, add clarity, adjust shadows and highlights, set black and white points, add some vibrance. Where I added extra processing was a graduated filter in the sky to water line, erase some of the mask on the mountains, bring down exposure 1 stop, add a bit more clarity and cool the white balance a bit to bring out the blue in the upper portion of the sky for a contrasting effect with the warm tones on the lower 2/3 of the image.

Final Image Processed in Lightroom 6

In camera JPEG

Straight out of camera JPEG

Unprocessed RAW file

Unprocessed RAW file converted to JPEG in Lightroom 6

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027•366 • 2016 • Colusa National Wildlife Refuge

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