A very quick post today, a heavily processed image of palm trees, captured in Honolulu in March, 2011. An experiment in Lightroom processing with exposure increased dramatically, and significant colour enhancements as well. Not an image that will appeal to everyone.
Currently, I’m on the road and will update this entry with further details when I return. This entry is, for the moment, just to assure regular readers that I haven’t fallen off the edge of the world!


Image Processing steps in Lightroom.
Profiled lens correction, corrected for vignetting and linear distortion in the original image. (Notice the intrusion in the bottom right corner on the original image is gone)
Spot removal
Increased exposure by 1.0 stop
Contrast reduced, set at -25 points
Shadows to 100 points
Whites to -50 points
Clarity 30 points, Saturation and Vibrance both to 20 points
Individual colour values: Blue -100 points Saturation and +100 points Luminance. Aqua, no change. All other colours +50 points Saturation.
The file was then taken into Photoshop CS5 for copyright reminder text and converted to sRBG for Jpeg export.
The point of this exercise is simply to demonstrate how far you can quickly take a fairly mundane image and produce a completely different and graphic effect. The adjustments made in this instance are wildly beyond what I would normally do, but in this case, a “realistic” image wasn’t what I was going for. As always, if anyone has any comments or questions please let me know. ~KD.