About a month ago I wrote about Adobe Lightroom’s Direct Positive effect and the dramatic effects it had on several of the pictures I had taken.
Well, I should have been shooting in raw. Applying the Direct Positive settings to Raw photographs has a much more understated impact — at least for some of the raw shots I was taking today. For example, the skybox complex for the NCSU football stadium (click to go to Flickr and see the larger sizes)
Before:
After:
It’s still a little dramatic here — but it’s very, very different from the effects that it had on the jpg’s I was shooting before.
It’s even better with pictures of cows with holes in their sides (I was too far away to get a good picture, so I’m just showing the effect):
This effect really works well, and gives this image a much better color contrast.
I really think I’ll be shooting predominately in raw from now on, Lightroom also seems a bit snappier with the NEF images — believe or not (you can choose “not” — I’m still not completely convinced myself)