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7 July 2016

We couldn't pass by this olive tree the other day without taking a quick snapshot. Its twisted trunk would win no Tree Beauty Contest. And the daylight diffused by the fog was no beauty lamp. But we knew the feeling.

Some Days. Ever had a day when you felt like this?.

So we lined it up and took the shot. Aperture Priority at f6.3 left a shutter speed of 1/80 second at ISO 200. Maybe a little overexposed to judge by the highlights.

But we could fix that because we shot Raw, not JPEG.

We knew exactly what we wanted to do with the image, too. You could get fancy and call that visualization, but let's just call it experience. We knew what we could do in post processing because we've done it before.

We thought we'd use Capture Pro 9.2 because we know next to nothing about it.

What we wanted to do was:

  • Bump up the contrast on the trunk to emphasize its twist
  • Add a vignette to the image to darken everything else
  • Crop it to 16:9 because we like that aspect ratio
  • Crop in the footpath leading to the tree

If we did that right, it would work in black and white. But the colors are so muted in the fog that we liked that better.

The only real head scratching we did was in picking the software to work on it. We have our choice of Photoshop CC 2015.5, DxO Optics Pro 11.1, Exposure X, Lightroom CC and Capture Pro 9.2.

We thought we'd use Capture Pro 9.2 because we know next to nothing about it. We're just beginning to get acquainted for a full review. Why not jump in with both feet?

It was actually pretty easy to find the tools we needed to do what we wanted with this image. And we enjoyed the experience. Particularly when we saw the final image.

We exported the full resolution image and then used a Keyboard Maestro command that displayed an HTML form to run ImageMagick to create the thumbnail and give us the markup to add the image to this story. That worked pretty well, too.

Some days do twist you out of shape. But this wasn't one of them.


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