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Friday Slide Show: Thornton in the Sun
13 October 2023
The plan was to return to Thornton Beach to photograph the hang gliders and paragliders. But when we got there, nobody was riding the updrafts. Not a soul. Just one hawk being pestered by some ravens.
What do you do when your model is a no show? Power on the camera and shoot away anyway. At least the sun was shining unlike last time.
And, in our case, we thought we'd cram a nice hike into the deal, too. We've been doing way too much driving and not enough hiking this year. So when we get a chance to hoof it, we do.
Except, we learned later, our fabric Skechers were not designed for the sandy trails at Thornton. We must have spent an hour getting the sand out of them.
That wasn't the only lesson waiting for us.
The Adobe MAX upgrade for Lightroom Classic to version 13.0 introduced new Develop tools that immediately threw us for a loop. More powerful and easy? Sure. But unfamiliar too.
Zoom the screen shots by mousing over them. Turns out the Arc browser can't pop up our screen shots, so we're working around that problem this way.
The two we knew we had to contend with were HDR/SDR Display ad Point Color.
Changing the display mode means you have no idea what effect your edits will have on other devices. They may look spectacular on your HDR monitor only to fall quite flat when seen through a browser.
But when we initially looked at our Nikon D300 images captured with our repaired 18-200mm Nikkor, we knew we couldn't ignore the issue. They appeared to be horrid captures, grossly overexposed.
Except they weren't really. That was just the display.
We saw an immediate, gratifying, gorgeous improvement the minute we clicked on the HDR button. We were astonished to see the faded image transformed into what seemed like a 3D effect.
HDR Editing/SDR Preview. You can preview the SDR effect when editing HDR on an HDR display. The histogram shows what's not visible.
But we also knew, much as we enjoyed it, you wouldn't be able to see it in a browser. So we returned to reality.
Or mostly. The nice thing about Point Color is that it lets you make a local color correction, recapturing some of that HDR glory. Sort of like lassoing a calf.
Point Color. We set a point in the sky and used the panel to deepen the blue.
It's to Adobe's credit if this slide show looks at all appealing because the tools have been reinvented and the learning curve would have had to be quite short for us to make good use of them.
Or it could just be that Thornton looks better in the sun.
