Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


— @joahua

From the shadows

01 Jan 2006

The original, shadowy image of the front of the pile of gear
The edited image of the front of the same pile of gear

I ♥ the GIMP.

The above edit (dark is before, light — visible — is after) took me about a minute and a half, and went something like Curve, Despeckle, Resample (scale for web), Despeckle (finer adjustment on wand-selected area), Unsharp Mask. I don’t think I even know how to do all those things on Photoshop!

But that wasn’t the purpose of this post. The darker original was the source from which I extracted the quite-visible lighter version. That is why I nearly always shoot with my flash off: it’s possible to recover ridiculous amounts from the shadows — even with a crappy digital that won’t let you use RAW — but it’s nigh on impossible to recover that lost to the nether-regions of over-exposed stock.

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