Flowers! It's summer!

So I wandered out to the Horticulture Garden on campus and snapped some photos. Not too much in bloom, but I found a few flowers that were really pretty. I also have a fun example below that I'll explain.

So these red flowers were incredibly bright, I'm not a fan of how strong the red is, it's overpowering, but I had trouble reducing it to a decent level. Still, a very pretty red for a flower.

It's hard to tell in this photo, but these flowers are actually blue and purple, I almost missed it when I was walking by.

Raw photo     /    Edited photo

Now these two are the exact same photo, and it's tough to tell without a full screen version, but this is one of the advantages to shooting in 'raw' format. Most cameras just save photos as JPEGs, but most DSLRs also can save in a 'raw' format. For my Canon, it's .CR2. The benefit is that I can edit a much wider range of settings than a JPEG without losing quality. Some of the major edits that are present: color correction, light balancing, lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, detail recovery, and fill lighting. All of that comes together to tweak parts of the photo that were slightly skewed.

Open up both of them in tabs and click back and forth between then and you can see the major changes.

To list a few fixes that you can look for yourself: The flower petals on the left side were overexposed and too bright, I tried to restore some of that color and detail. The center of the flower was too bright/saturated with color, I reduced that and balanced it to be more appealing. I also added some light to the right side to give it a bit more balance across the flower. It's not a great photo, but it's a good example of how a 'meh' photo can be improved with RAW editing.