I spent last spring break in Panama with my beautiful wife Ellen. I have nearly two thousand images to sort through and I hope you are as excited to see them as I am to share them.
I’m going to begin this blog with where we left off in Panama, on the San Blas Islands of the Guna Yala, an indigenous tribe in Panama’s Caribbean Sea.
When I first downloaded the images I was extremely disappointed that I wasn’t able to capture the true color of the blue green water surrounding the islands. And then I figured it out. In Lightroom, in the Develop module, right below Basic, is a tab marked HSL / Color / B&W. I clicked on that, scrolled down to Saturation, clicked on the little cross to the left, took it over a color I wanted to enhance and wah-lah! saturated colors! MUCH more like the colors we experienced on the islands, even with cloudy skies.
This is the image after I worked on it.Here is another before/after example with the beach, palm trees, water and sky.The following images all were enhanced using the same tool. You also have a choice of enhancing the Hue and Luminance, all of which can give you results closer to what you actually saw.I know I spent the few days we had on these islands pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.The colors were so amazing and vibrant. I was so glad and relieved to discover I could convey those colors in my images.In order to do this, though, you have to shoot in RAW, not JPG. As one of my favorite photographers puts it, imagine you have a bucket of pixels and information (that’s RAW) as opposed to a cup. That’s JPG. RAW gives you much more latitude when it comes to post processing your images. It will also use up more of your memory card so be sure to use big enough ones that you won’t run out on a shoot.There are other post processing softwares out there, I happen to use Lightroom for organizing and post processing.Don’t be scared, switch that camera to RAW and give yourself more creative options when post processing your fabulous images.
