You can do better than what the camera gives you
I am a firm believer in the adage, “What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with.” Fireworks are an excellent example. I got lots of great fireworks pictures last night at the SeaWorld (San Diego) Spectacular! fireworks show. However, each picture — bar none! — had something wrong with it…. underexposed, overexposed, too far away, too close, extraneous lights in the picture, people in the picture….
Fireworks, then, make a great case for using digital photo editing programs. To wit, below are pairs of pictures, the original first and my edited version second.
I used both Adobe Lightroom 4.1 and Corel PaintShop Pro X4 to do editing. I like the crop function and the clone functions in PaintShop Pro better than Lightroom and Photoshop, so I used PaintShop Pro to crop the pictures and clone streetlights, people, and extraneous light speckes out of the pictures. After saving the result, I went to Lightroom where I used the Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, and Clarity sliders (Love sliders, edible or not!) to get rid of smoke glare, overexposure, and underexposure.
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Posted on July 5, 2012, in Adobe, Corel, Digital photo editing, How I Did It, Manmade, Photos and tagged Adobe Lightroom 4.1, adobe photoshop cs6, corel paintshop pro x4, fireworks pictures. Bookmark the permalink. 24 Comments.
Huge difference! Cool shots:)
Love your before and after fireworks. They look great. I use PSP 8 the last few years. Also since I bought a new Olympus a few months ago experimenting with their viewer with the lightbox.
It’s amazing to me how a little bit of movement and a little different lighting can have such a huge impact. I would LOVE to get into photography and learn all of this stuff someday soon. Amazing photos! Thank you for sharing.
I love seeing before & after shots and what editing can do. I wish more photography blogs would share their editing tips.
Yup, undeniably better…although I don’t know how you find the time! By the time I take my daily shots, give them a once over and basic crop and contrast, then pick what to post, it’s past bedtime….well, with a stopover to check on my friends’ blogs of course.
I’m glad you put in so much energy Russel, and thanks for sharing the beautiful results.
You’ve inspired me. I’m using Smart Photo Editor on some of my shots; am crazy about some of the effects they have.
Great shots! Love the effects you have created.
Be sure to go back a post or two to see the 25 best fireworks photos from last night.
outstanding work on your photos. great patience and creativity!
Thank you for your kind words.
Great photoshot reasult my friend. wow! STUNNING. I like fireworks
. By the way many thanks for your visiting, I appreciate it. You right, we can do better than our menu camera.
Love your pictures! Haven’t used any of what you’ve listed, I’m SUCH a novice! However my curiosity is now awakened!
I believe you can try any of them using the free 30-day trial download at the Adobe and Corel web sites. If you do, and need help with anything, let me know.
Cool! Will check them out this weekend.
Do the Lightroom program first. I think it’s the easiest to use, and it has 95% of the features that the general public would ever have a need for………Are you part of the general public? lol
lol! now just how did you guessed that ??!! that was Lightroom wasn’t it? Yeah that’s right – lightroom program or something rather
thanks for the suggestion 
Nice pictures! Cheers!
Thanks Alex!
You are welcome!!
Nice work. I’m a GIMP nut, but I haven’t really gotten into anything too heavy with it. I agree that a regular camera image is really just the start. The best thing about photo editing software, for me, is being able to tweak an image to where it looks more like the way you actually saw the subject with your eyes. The work you did on the fireworks seems that way. They came out like what someone would be paying attention to in the actual live display. Really great photography Russel, as always.
Thank you, Dave. I tried GIMP (and Picasa and Picnik) but couldn’t really get into them. I think it’s because I have been using Photoshop, Photo-Paint, and PaintShop for 20 years. This old dog wasn’t up to learning new tricks……..lol
Ha! And there’s me just pointing and clicking and expecting to get a half decent photo. Serves me right for being so lazy!
You’ll get a half decent photo! Now, your mission, should you decided to accept it, isi to make those half decent photos into awesome photos!……….lol
Hello Zoey the cool cat. A good approval, this post. Fireworks come & go, but that you can ACTUALLY capture them mid through their life is very clever work. Excellent photos, really excellent.