Pat's Approach to Working an Image.

So Al asked me to show you guys how I work an image. First off I am not Stan and still pretty new to both photography and post processing. Note that I am using Adobe Lightroom CC. So bare with me lol.

First I will show you the RAW image. As you can see the RAW image can be rather bland compared to the jpg you might see on the LCD screen on the back of your camera. Note that any settings you have changed in the camera are applied to the jpg version displayed on your LCD. For this reason I leave many settings to their default values so I can get a fair idea on how the RAW file will appear. Not sure how this works in practice lol.

RAW (or NEF for Nikon)
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As you can see the horizon line is way off so I will first fix that. I click on the Crop Overlay which is the little dotted square under the histogram and level the image. Once I click on the Crop Overlay I will use the right and left arrows on the keyboard as I generally prefer to eyeball it myself. Definitely use the Crop Overlay (lines on the image) to align the image. Click on the Crop Overlay icon to apply the change. You can try the Auto button also.

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