RAW format pears

photo copyright Rose Welty

Have you ever noticed that some photographers are very "arty" with their photos? I downloaded the Guardian Eyewitness app for the iPad a while ago. Basically they give you the best of their photos, approximately one a day, with about 100 available at any one time. The photos are all related to news stories but some of them have such incredible "after photo" manipulations that they tend towards fine art. They are photos, not paintings, but some of them would make great reference photos! (They are copyrighted, so don't use them.)

That made me think, although I'm not a professional photographer, maybe I could at least take a few steps down that path and create some better reference photos for myself to work from.

So, I started shooting my photos in RAW format the other day. Once you add the necessary plugin to PSE, you can open up RAW files and start playing around with slider bars - you don't even have to really know what the words mean, just look at what happens in the preview and decide what you want.

The photo at the top is the one I am using for my reference. Below is the unedited version.

It took me about a minute to make those changes and all I did was slide some bars around. I'm definitely shooting in RAW format from now on.

I'm think I'm going to participate in Regina Burchett's Pearathon.