Do not Adjust your Screens!

During my Hawaii and Japan trip last month, I spent a lot of time tweaking images' colors, saturation, and other settings to try and develop some post-processing chops. Some of those experiments works. Some. I'll share some that didn't work this week, too.


These two images are variations of the same shot. Neither is true-color, though the one below is bit closer. Basically, these illustrate what some layers, blending, and different basic effects can do in Photoshop. This is also why so many people who use Photoshop probably shouldn't.



I took this long-duration shot at sunset with an ND1000 filter on the front. Fortunately, the clouds were moving fast enough to allow for ample blur in 30 seconds. Notice the diagonal band of lighter image and the darker spots on the side? When you go to buy your variable ND (4 to 1000, in my case), don't buy the $16 one.


Night shot. This is actually pretty close to real life. The hotel had a nice view (when photographed correctly), but it was fairly noisy. I had to choose, most nights, between sleeping in a warm room with a very anemic air conditioner or sleeping in a comfortable room with ludicrous street noise.


And here's the shot by day, to give you an idea of what the colors actually looked like. It was, honestly, a nice view.