If you missed my post last week, much of the Earth was exposed to some significant geomagnetic activity from the sun causing some pretty impressive light shows ala the Aurora Borealis. You can read more about it here.
As I mentioned, @mrsbozz and I ventured out and while I didn't have a proper camera with me, smartphones these days can still take some pretty impressive shots. I usually keep my Pixel 8 Pro in HDR mode, but I recently read it is better to use the RAW mode that many devices have these days, so I thought I would give it a shot (pun intended).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like RAW mode used to be something that was reserved the elite or professional photographers. Something you could only access via a fancy (and expensive) DSLR camera. These large unaltered photos gave you a virtual blank canvas for spending hour on editing and retouching.
I would imagine many of the purists probably think it is sacrilegious that you can how take RAW photos with a Smartphone. Maybe I'm wrong. The fact is, most of us are looking for some kind of "easy mode" at life, and spending hours editing photos isn't our idea of fun. That HDR mode we default to does a fine job. I can't honestly argue with that. I have taken some pretty amazing photos in HDR mode. Photos that I have been able to turn into prints to put on my wall and they look amazing.
I don't feel it's ever too young to learn though, and that is why I am writing this post.
I'm sure many of you have seen this meme over the past weekend or so. The Aurora show had people snapping photos like crazy. The biggest problem is, many of the northern lights photos you see on Facebook are heavily processed. I feel like some people go a little off the rails with their RAW photos bumping the saturation up to oblivion and sure, it makes for a beautiful shot, but it also gives people a false impression of what to expect when they take their own photos.
My dad is a photographer. I grew up with a black and white dark room right off our living room. It was just an everyday thing for us. Back then though, any refinishing or retouching you needed done had to be sent out to a lab for artists to actually hand alter the photos or negatives.
Despite all that, I am at a total loss about what to do with my newly acquired RAW photos. I have access to several pieces of software like Corel Draw, Adobe PhotoShop Elements 15, Adobe Premiere Pro 2024, and DarkTable, but I have no idea what to do with them.
That's the real reason I am writing this post.
I think my biggest problem is I don't know where to start...
So I have a brand new shiny RAW image loaded into my software, what next? I've been looking for some kind of "auto" button that just automatically applies the most common settings or filters, but then I started thinking, if I am going to do that, why even bother with RAW imagines anyway?
I may as well just use the HDR image that the phone was taking before and call it good.
Perhaps for my little posts here on Hive, that's all I need. I'm willing to accept that, but there are times that I wish the colors were a little more vibrant or lights shimmered just a little more (if you know what I mean).
I don't expect your comment to be a master class on photo editing, even if you just say here, watch this tutorial, I'd be cool with that. I'm just looking for some advice from what I know is a very knowledgeable community here on the blockchain.
I'm looking forward to learning!
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