Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Postcard from San Francisco

As you can see, this is another one of my photos from the America’s Cup races last summer. As I said in previous blog, it was such a joy to be there to enjoy the races and take some photos with my new camera. After all, you don’t see these kinds of boats very often.

This photo is of the back of the New Zealand Kiwi boat. What makes this photo so special for me is the use of a new post-processing tool in Adobe’s Lightroom that brought the photo to life.

Its called the Radial tool, but I just refer to it as the Spotlight Tool…with it you can highlight a certain area of the photo with a “spotlight” and at the same time, lower to exposure of the surrounding areas.

In this case, I created an oval-shaped area around the center of the boat and made it slightly brighter, while lowering the light of everything else, including the background of the America’s Cup Park. Notice the water underneath the boat and extending out to the white sailboat in the background…see how much brighter it is and how the rest of the water (and the park) are darker? The sun helped, but so did the Spotlight Tool.

That is what the Spotlight Tool does…it brings the eye to exact place I want it to be when you view this photo. The whole focus of this picture is the boat, with the rest only serving as a backdrop. 

The digital tools available for processing photos these days are amazing. It is hard to keep up with all of them. But I try. I hope I didn’t bore you with this bit of technical stuff. Sorry if I did…but please enjoy the photo anyway.

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