Playing with some photos

I was messing about with the raw conversion program I use last night (Bibble 5) and found some features that are quite helpful.

The most useful thing I found was Layers. I've seen the toolbar there but never used it until now. It lets you select an area of an image and apply different setting to that area. Really useful for setting a different exposure on a sky for example:

I selected the sky area and adjusted the exposure down, leaving the rest of the picture how I had it before.

Here's the original for comparison:

No detail in the sky...

I also found a wavelet sharpening plugin that's far better than the built in sharpening, and it also does USM too, no need for gimp!

The RAW noise removal makes things better too:

From Ko Lanta. Still noisy, but better.

And one taken last night:

The lines are the prayer lanterns being set off from Ao Nang.

Now this means I have to go back through all the photos I've taken to see if I can recover any other images, at least I have time :)