This was my first real try at night time photography. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
That's really good, esp. from a P&S. Most P&S pictures would involve bumping the ISO up to compensate for the low light. But I'm reading ISO 50, 1.4 sec exposure, and f/2.8 ish...I'm guessing you used a tripod, right? (if so good job!) It's hard to get the exposures out of the shadows without blowing out the highlights, but that's why shooting RAW rather than JPG helps. Good job!
Actually, there's a lot more detail in this photo than what we see here, but I won't download, alter, and repost without permission from DisneyGeek92.
Thanks DisneyGeek92. I wasn't trying to steal your thunder or anything like that, but I wanted to show that: #1 - Great images can be made by a P&S camera, and... #2 - You don't always have to shoot RAW all the time. We tend to process the heck out of our RAW images, but we sometimes ignore what we have in our JPGs. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Scott, what did you do to that photo in PS to get that all to come out? Was it simply adjusting the brightness? Thanks for the quick lesson.
There are a couple ways to do that, but in this case you definitely do not want to use the brightness control. Since this photo has a range of brightnesses from very dark to very bright, you would be making the dark parts better, but you would be blowing out the bright parts very quickly. You could make a new layer, adjust the brightness, then erase the parts that are blown out (revealing the darker parts from the layer below), but there are better ways. Two of the ways are Levels and Curves. I use Levels a lot for "regular" photos, and Curves for the "problem" ones. However, in this case I used the Shadow/Highlight control in CS3. It does pretty much the same thing as Curves, with an easier-to-use interface. In fact, the Shadow/Highlight control is also great for pictures taken in bright sunlight, with high contrast. You can bring up the shadows while keeping the highlights down.
Wow... I barely understood half of what Scott said! But the picture does look great! There is hope for us point and shooters, after all!
