I blame the recent too-early-cause-it-ain’t-officially-winter-yet flurry action for the delay in posting this next segment. It made for great pictures, but not so great motivation to sit down and write. Also, I had too much hot chocolate yesterday.

But last night, I re-arranged my computer room to put my two machines closer to each other. And this morning, I hooked up my external drive to my CS3 machine (because that’s all I’m using it for) so I could work on a few of my older images. Particularly this one:

That’s a picture of the river that flows through our town. I was so disappointed with the photo because the colors seemed flat and lifeless. Not at all anything like the vibrant yellows and golds and reds and oranges that I remembered. I mean, I wouldn’t have made my son stop on the side of a winding road so I could walk out in the cold drizzling rain while crazy-fast drivers more than twice almost made me roadkill if the view hadn’t been that spectacular.

Whew. That was a long sentence.

Fortunately for me, I felt like I learned enough to give this a whack at Photoshop.

What I learned at the CS3 Power Tour:

4. While older versions of Photoshop are definitely robust enough to fix your JPG mistakes, doing it in Camera Raw is so much easier and faster.

It took literally minutes and only a few clicks. I loaded up the photo and fixed the exposure first. Then I bumped up the midtones, increased blacks, and added a bit of fill light. Then I threw it back to Photoshop for final sharpening. With a little cropping to finish it off, here’s the before and after:

It may seem oversaturated to you, but I’m telling you, that right there matches exactly what I remember seeing that afternoon. And now I can finally feel like I didn’t waste my time standing on that bridge with cold hands that afternoon. Because you know that the afternoon means high school kids are on the road with their new licenses, and the stuff they were shouting at me while I was walking around scouting for better vantage points could fill another post.

Man, what is it with me a long sentences today?

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Addendum: Just for kicks, and because it looks pretty, here’s a version done by Sherweld using the Orton Effect.

Dreamy, yes? Makes me think of sitting by a fireplace, curled up with a good book or just looking out the window admiring nature. Aaaah. I think I need to go get some hot chocolate now to complete the image. Excuse me while I overload myself with yet more sugar and cocoa.