photo editing

Turning lemons into another post

Occasionally my phone will take a photo on its own. I’m not entirely sure how it happens, but the image almost always looks like a fight scene from the 1960s Batman TV show, with the angle all askew.

One such photo happened recently when I stood on top of the Cariboo Dam, preparing to take a picture of the scenery. What my phone caught on its own was a shot of my feet and the railing.

I’ve cropped the image and applied a lot of effects using Luminar AI to give it a high contrast, hyperreal kind of look. It’s all abstract(ish) up in the hizzy.

I’ve also included the original photo for reference.

Heavily edited
Unedited! Shot courtesy of my iPhone 12 doing its own thing

Jet overhead, a before and after comparison

The title of this post is very on the nose.

Here’s a comparison of the original photo of a jet flying overhead that I recently took with my Canon EOS M50 camera, and then a version of the photo after I tweaked the contrast and color a bit in Luminar AI:

The changes are pretty obvious:

  • The sky is no longer completely blasted out, allowing the mix of high cloud and blue to show
  • The blue of the aircraft underside has been boosted a bit, not to exaggerate it, but to make it look more as it actually appeared
  • The overall contrast of the jet was adjusted, to better bring out detail in the structure (when looking at a smaller version of the photo, it may simply look darker; the detail is best seen at full or near-full size)

Now, you could argue that the bright, overexposed sky of the original works because it puts the jet in stark contrast to it, effectively highlighting it more than my tweaked version. And I would agree–but it’s also a matter of preference. Overall, I like the tweaked version because to my eye it’s a better representation of what I saw, and does not try to misrepresent the object(s) depicted. For example, Luminar AI lets you add giraffes to the sky (yes, it really does), but I did not add any giraffes! Or hot air balloons, or bald eagles, or any of the other silly things you can put in to spice things up.

Tweaking photos is now something I find almost as enjoyable as the actual shooting of the photos themselves. Maybe I just have a need to fix things.