My Lake Champlain Before and After

[Nerwin]

I shared a shot I took on Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont and a lot of you really liked it and thought it would be a good idea to share the before and after images with you.

Before



The one thing that I messed up was not setting my aperture to f/7.1 or f/11 and shooting in RAW, I only shot this in f/3.5 and in JPEG Fine, but with that said it still didn't come out bad. Stupid me.... But hey at least I got the shot and it really isn't that bad as it is. This is just image straight off the camera with no edits.

After


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So as you can see there was a dramatic change. I opened it up with Photoshop CS5 used the HDR toning under the adjustments menu and selected surrealistic setting and began to make fine adjustments with the exposure and other settings to achieve the right look I was going for and I got it. I then imported it into Lightroom 3 and made tiny adjustments there like sharpening, some contrast and then a little color and noise reduction and then cropped and rotated it a little. Only if I had took this image in RAW format and maybe a smaller aperture, it might of came out a little better but to be honest I don't think it wouldn't be that huge of a difference.