A few days ago, around sunrise, the sky was just incredible. I couldn’t stop right then, but I rushed my errands and stopped at a local pond on my way back. No camera, just my phone. The phone automatically selected “sunrise/sunset” mode and did a good job of capturing the sky and clouds, but I wanted to get the golden light on the trees and bushes as well.
I did try the editor on my Android phone. Not a special app, just the one that was there. It often does a decent job for a quick post to Facebook, but on these photos, it wasn’t doing the job. Here’s the original, best effort phone edit, and ACDSee version.
Now I’ll grant I’ve edited thousands more images in ACDSee than I have or ever will on my phone, but I hope you can see why I don’t usually settle for using the phone. It’s not a fair comparison, or meant to be. Each has its place. The purpose of this post is to share my method for enhancing this type of photo, and possibly to push some people into scoping out a fully-featured image editor. Naturally, my choice would be ACDSee!
If you don’t care for the technical details, feel free to jump to the gallery and look at the other photos I took on this three-minute photo expedition, plus one that I couldn’t resist on my driveway when I got home.
Typical ACDSee Workflow
Here’s the same photo in Develop mode in ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2021.
The next two edits use Light EQ. First I lighten the dark foreground (and other similar parts) by left-clicking on a representative area and dragging up. In this case it was around the base of the tree in the foreground, adjusting until the gold colour starts to show. Then I darkened the sky by right clicking on a blue area and right-clicking and dragging down. In both cases, as I am dragging, I watch the effect on the image and check that there are no red areas appearing on the Light EQ chart.
The major changes are done. The remaining tweaks may be more imaginary than necessary! First, a touch of vibrance.
Now a tiny amount of contrast.
And a little warmth using white balance.
Finally, straightening the image using the tower on the horizon as a reference and using the tool which lets you draw a line on an object which should be either horizontal or vertical (the latter in this case). Then I cropped to a classic 4×6 format, which I had not done when I was editing on the phone.
Side notes
Some things I found interesting:
I’m used to editing RAW files. When you go back to look at a jpg image which was edited using develop mode, previous changes do not show – they are baked into the file. I found this out when I was in the middle of recreating the changes so I could get screen shots and I went back to see what I had done the first time I edited this image. There was nothing!
Next I found that the history disappears when you leave develop mode to look at another image. I decided not to start over to get perfect screen shots!
Lastly, editing a photo is very subjective. It’s interesting to see what changes when you re-edit an image. I suspect it’s almost impossible to do the exact same thing twice in a row, and even if it was possible, it’s probable that the way you feel will affect the editing decisions you make.
Speaking of artistic decisions, I suspect something like a sunrise can be interpreted in far more ways than, say, a portrait. I have chosen a fairly bold interpretation, probably because I see most colours as being fairly subdued, so what I think is a good reproduction of what I saw may strike others as over the top. I try to take that into consideration, but I probably fail more often than not!
Photo gallery
Here are the other photos I took that morning. As always, unless you are viewing this on a phone, your best experience will be to click on any photo and then scroll through the others so you can see them full size.
