When showing off the images I took to friends the question they frequently ask and the question which let me down is- "Have you used Photoshop???".

The fact is I don’t use Photoshop that much...

I use Adobe Light Room, lol... :p

It’s a wonderful tool actually- the flexibility, features and the ease of use are what make the Light Room photographer's favorite. And if you are a RAW file shooter then the possibilities are mind-blowing…

But I don’t believe neither Photoshop nor Light Room can transform a bad pic to a great pic… But It can surely make a good one better…

If am using a DSLR I prefer to shoot in low contrast normal color, sharpness settings since all these can be brought back to the image in post processing(PP in short form). And if am using a point and shoot camera I will try to make it as perfect as possible in the device itself since the JPEG format in those devices won’t give that much flexibility in PP.

Here are the before and after of two of my pics from Rameswaram.

Before :

After:

Before:

After:

Ya… I know… But the processing done these pics are not that complicated… A few color corrections and cropping is all I did in these… If you are wondering how much data(exposure, color, sharpness etc) can be recovered through PP take a look at the below example.

Before:

After:

Holly COW…!!!! Right….? I was also stunned at the first time…

In future posts I will share some tips and techniques I learned and I uses every time in PP if you guys are interested in knowing them… Leave me a comment…

As always weekends are the time I experiment- sometimes photography sometimes on VFX and stuffs... A well-known technique called- Time lapsing caught my attention this time, have seen some awesome time-lapse video on YouTube and what to say- I was dying to try the technique... The problem was I didn’t have some equipment essential to make a good time lapse such as Tripod and cable release... But I was determined to give it a try... I choose Kanyakumari as location as it is a familiar location for me and shooting the sunset from there was the Idea!

The time was not right- in this time of the year it will be cloudy at the end of the day which I knew in the first place but still I hoped that I will get some interesting cloud formation and a colorful sunset. Disappointed and tired I decided to go back home and as I Looked back to east I was stunned to see the moon rising behind the “Thiruvalluvar statue”. If I had a 500 mm or above lens I would have got solitude of Thiruvalluvar statue and Vivekananda memorial from sunset point with the rising moon as background. A foreigner was there with a DSLR and some fancy gears and am sure that he got a frame as mentioned above.

Leaving the disappointments behind I race to the sunrise point- also the moon rise point now- hoping for some good shots of the moon rise. But when I got there the moon was already above the Vivekananda memorial. I ran here and there looking for different frames and fired a few shots.

Then the idea- time lapsing- came to my mind, I looked for spots from where I can get a decent composition and most importantly a support structure of some kind to use as Tripod. Finally I found the spot near the temple and after many test shots I began to shoot 2 sec long frames to sort of smoothing the rough sea a bit with a 1 sec gap between each frame and all done manually. Huh….! Hardwork… Later at home a few editing in Lightroom and final composting in After Effects and with that my first Time-lapse video was ready to be published… Not a perfect one but am happy with the result… Hope you guys will also enjoy my work…! Watch it here…

One of 87 pics used for the timelapse video...