The Handbags...

... and the Gladrags. Otherwise known as the view from my office!

[finished version on my [url=http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/1334020]Kinda Horrigans[/url] journal]

So... take one horribly underexposed image and try to rescue it on yet another day when you have no photos! That's today's challenge.

A lot of the rescuing was done with the RAW file. I increased the exposure by +1, nudged up the brightness, reduced the blacks and reduced the contrast. Clarity I bumped up by +30 as that's always good for bringing out architectural detail. Then, opened in Photoshop. The image still needed a bit of rescuing of the darker areas, so I used a 50% grey layer set to overlay mode to dodge bits of the mid and foreground parts of the image leaving the sky pretty much alone.

Shots like this that have good strong contrasts between textures and lines, I generally prefer as b&w. So, with this I converted it using Silver Efex Pro - again, contrast and brightness down and structure up and then warmed the tones slightly. And it's alright, I reckon!

Flattened and sharpened. And that was it.

Yet another rescued shot!

Tip of the Day:
For all the waffling about RAW files, the old saying about the best camera being the one you have with you is still true. So, when I saw an article from National Geographic on 'How to take camera phone pictures' it was one of those moments of coming back to knowing how to 'see' a shot being much more important than the nerdy stuff I've written above.