Enhanced Detail

Yesterday  the Madison Flickr Meeters went to the dome of the Olbrich Gardens in search of macro images. I started off with  my 18-105mm kit lens mounted to the D7000. It's more of a closeup lens than a macro lens so I also packed up several other lens I planned to check out.

One problem I hadn't considered propped up immediately. The humidity in dome was 100% Tropical Rain Forest; my camera and lenses which had been sitting in the car were cooled down to 100% Madison Winter Frigid. Instant condensation.

Continually wiping off the filter on top of the lens was an annoyance but not a major problem. Doing the same thing to the sensor would have been a disaster. So the lens stayed on. No real macro images but some decent flower closeup.

Contrast Disabled

 Contrast enabled

Which became even more decent when I used the RAW Therapee features I blogged about yesterday.  If you do macro photography RAW Therapee is worth looking at just for Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. (There has to be a better name than "Contrast by Detail Layers.")

Am I about to toss out Photoshop? No. I shot with an off-camera flash but in this image there were a few small areas that reflected the flash straight into the camera and created annoying hot spots. So I imported the jpeg into PS and used the healing brush to clean up the image. Can't have everything in a RAW converter.

Edit-When I posted the image on flickr and viewed the black box original I saw that the image looked noisy. Setting the fine slider to 2.2 did a SUPER GREAT job of bringing out and amplifying  the noise in the image! Setting it to zero cleaned the image up. Something to remember if you use the feature.