A Good Argument for Shooting in RAW [HOW I TOOK IT]

Earlier in the year DPS forum member stevoarnold (on flickr here) shared in the ‘how I took it‘ section how he’d managed to get the following transformation of an image because he shot it in RAW and was able to do significant post production and recover much of the image despite it being under exposed.

See the two images at before and after.

Here’s his description of how he did it:

“I thought I would share with you my latest experience. I went out this evening with the intention of getting some nice dusk shots of the sea shore but left it a little late and it was pitch black when I got there. I took some shots anyway which turned out completely under exposed due to lack of light even at a 30 second exposure.

So I got them home, imported a RAW file into photoshop and after a little bit of fiddling about I came up with the image below.

Here are the steps I took to get from this Before shot to the after shot:

1. Open RAW file in photoshop

2. Increase the exposure by 2 stops and then “open image”

3. Create an “Orton effect” layer by:

• Duplicate background layer
• Add gaussian blur to the duplicate
• Set blend mode to Soft Light

4. Add a curves adjustment layer to increase brightness

5. Flatten, rotate to straighten and crop final image

Got an image that you want us to tell us about the shooting and processing photograph of? Submit it to our How I Took It forum.