Finally Got One..........

We out the other day to Lake Manawa in Iowa to see if I could find me some eagles. There were a bunch of them. Unfortunately the longest lens I have is a 55 to 250 mm zoom so even at the 250mm setting I was still too far away to suit me. So here is one that I ran through some heavy post processing. I almost like it but the processing caused some artifacts. But I got close to one on my bucket list.

Thanks for stopping by. Contact me or visit my web site( papagphotos.com ) if interested in buying anything.

Extreme Processing

I'm back..... just like a bad penny. Today I am posting a photo that I took at the NHRA drags in Topeka  KS last year. I took this from the finish line more than 1000 feet away. I applied some cropping and extreme post processing because I wanted to create a poster feeling to the event.

What I did was crop it in Lightroom and then take it to Photoshop for some heavy hitting. First I ran it through Nik Define to remove noise (there is always some noise in digital images). Next came a run through LucisArt for some grungy HDR like foolin' around. After that I took it for a dip in OnOne Perfect effects for some amazing detail and color boost. After applying these I next took it for a trip into Nik Color Effects Pro 4 for the border treatment. So here it is. Top is original and bottom is the extreme image.

Thanks for stopping by. Contact me or visit my web site( papagphotos.com ) if interested in buying anything.

Before and After

Well my buddy over at Iowa farm boy has thrown down the gauntlet. He just did a before and after blog showing how he improved an image using lightroom, photoshop and some filters. So I just had to give it a try.

The first thing i did was take the image into Lightroom and apply only the camera and lens profile to it. Next, into Photohsop and ran it through the Nik Define noise reduction filter. All digital images have at least a little noise so I do this with all my images. Next I ran it through a Lucis filter. This filter has some unique processing that can bring out a lot of detail in an image. In the filter you can mix different amounts of filtered settings and original image to get the look you want. Every image you process will need different settings. Next I took the image as processed to this stage into OnOne softwares Perfect Effects 4. There is a couple of presets in there that I use called Amazing Detail and Auto fix. You can adjust the strength of these presets to your liking. While I was in OnOne I decided for this image that I needed to brush in some more detail in the sky (yes you can do that in OnOne). I next applied all the OnOne settings and returned to Photoshop to add just a little levels adjustment. I should also point out that at the beginning of this process in Photoshop I removed some annoying power lines and cropped out a pole on the left side.

So here are the images. Top on is before and the bottom is after. Let me know what you think.

Thanks for stopping by. I know I have not blogged much lately but maybe I have got my juices flowing again. Check out my web site papagphotos.com for a gateway to my other images that are currently for sale.