Digital Darkroom

I am taking an online course from LVSonline.com, called Digital Darkroom with Photoshop. I have taught Photoshop in the past, and thought I was fairly up to speed on how to do things. But I am learning tons from a guy named Ron Lacey, a photographer who lives in Canada. In the first three lessons Ron has shown us how to use Adobe Camera Raw software that is the front end preprocessor for Photoshop CS3. I never realized how powerful ACR can be. It has an amazing number of built in tools to correct photos before the photo is opened in Photoshop.

I am also struck by how many people have been living with "dull" photos that come from their digital cameras. Wow, if only they knew how to brighten them up. Here is a photo taken by one of my classmates during a balloon festival in Iowa.



After I make some adjustments in Photoshop, the image is brightened considerably.



If only they knew how, it would be so easy. Perhaps our instructor will get to that later. I hope so.