Experiments with Photo Editing

I've had my Nikon D5200 DSLR for couple of months now and I finally decided to try editing my photos. While I don't dare purchase a subscription based editing software like Photoshop or Lightroom, I found one quite powerful and completely free software for RAW format editing: RawTherapee, which has so many adjusting possibilities that I've barely tried half of them.

So, here's 3 photos – before and after – that I decided to experiment with and see if I could improve their look. Feel free to tell what you think about the results.

1. Daylight Moon

^{Shutter speed:1/250 Aperture: f/8 ISO: 200}

I don't exactly remember what I did, but regardless, I did something that got a nice blue color for the sky that makes the moon pop up from the background. Green is also greener, I think saturation is what I added, not too much, but just the right amount. I did some detail stuff to make the branches appear bit sharper than in the original and added "Local Contrast" which makes the dark shades (like the birch stripes) appear bit more darker. Then I cropped the picture to get rid of the excess stuff especially on the right to highlight the Moon better.

2. Plane contrail

^{Shutter speed:1/400 Aperture: f/10 ISO: 100}

On the first round I somehow ended with the following:

But upon realizing that it looks like God had pissed on the sky, I tried again. I actually like this photo, too, but wanted to make another version with more clarity at the time.

I added a "Graduated Filter", as it is called, to tune down the dominating sun light on the left so it doesn't compete for attention with the trail. Then I found "Dynamic Range Compression" which allowed me to bring up the foreground which was completely dark in the original. Some other tiny adjustments too, but those mentioned were the most notable ones.

3. Sunset

^{Shutter speed:1/160 Aperture: f/6.3 ISO: 200}

This picture experienced the biggest make-up, thus being the most experimental of the three.

I added a lot of white balance which makes the overall look change from cold blue to warm yellow. And again I did adjustments to bring up some of the detail from the branches. (I just realized what's common between all the pictures: birches). Maybe there would exist a better edit for this picture, but at least there's much more detail on the sky which was covered by the overexposure of the sunlight in the original.

This was actually pretty fun, might do another one of these in the future.