The number of decent un-doctored images out in the World Wide Web are probably far and few between.  Most of the images found on this website would have had a few adjustments after a photograph was taken – most commonly a crop and/or a slight rotation. Minor adjustments to brightness and contrast are also made from time to time, but in the majority of cases this is all.  I try to do as much as I can at the point of the picture being taken so that the composition, exposure, focus and depth of field are as I wish.  Camera’s are very clever these days and they too will often make adjustments at the point the camera’s shutter is pressed too.

Most of the time, I try to make as few adjustments as possible to photographs so that they are as accurate as they can be.  Today however, the photographs in this blog post are a little more varied.  The picture at the top of this blog post was taken with the “Sweep Panorama” setting of a mobile phone that has given an interesting fisheye-esq perspective.  The pictures below were taken more conventionally but have had adjustments made to the picture shadow’s, highlights, mid-tones and contrast.  I’m fairly pleased with the results and in particular how doing this can go some-way to even out the high contrast.  One of my biggest challenges of taking pictures of steam locomotives is dealing with high contrast.

The software used to adjust these is Serif Photo Plus Starter Edition.  It is free to use and well worth downloading if you are a beginner to photo editing and want to have a go.  So here are a few pictures, all taken on the Watercress Line in Hampshire.  Hopefully they were worth the effort!

Ironically (considering how much I’ve written) this blog post has timed with “Wordless Wednesday!”  In the future I might be a little more faithful to the “wordless” ideal and put more effort into the picture/pictures.  As ever, watch this space for more!