Enhancing Snow Pics

Winter can be a fun time for photography. Snow looks so clean, so pure. On the other hand, slush can evoke a feeling of the dirty, grimy city. And then there's the juxtapositions available of things that don't seem to go together. 

Like this pic, a cactus in the snow:

Here is the original RAW image:

What I enhanced: the original image was made with flash to get some shine into the snow crystals, sunlight would have been nice, too, if available. I adjusted the exposure up a little bit to get a brighter looking snow. Cooling the color balance  towards the blue helps make it look whiter. If you work with colors, whether in paints, the darkroom, or on a computer, you will find that in order to get a whiter looking white, we add blue.

For this image, cooling the color balance muddled the green of the cactus, so I sampled the raw file's green and used those values to punch up the green. First, back to normal, then to make it a little bit more green. I try to avoid the unreal color look for most images. Special effects are a different story for a different post.

In between each step, I save my work as a TIFF instead of JPEG. If you keep saving as jpeg files, you will lose image file info at each step because of the compression inherent in jpeg saving. Saving as tiffs avoids the compression, but the files are huge. 50 or more MB for each step in this example. After saving the last tiff for the hard copy print, I then save a duplicate jpeg file. I save at 100% to avoid too much info loss. You can discard the in between step tiffs if you don't have a lot of memory space.

This cactus image was a fun exercise, but it isn't a good enough image to print. It's boring. In a future post, we'll talk about culling our files down to only the images worth printing.