I made a trip to the State Capitol Gift shop to drop off some cards, turns out that the store is closed and I never heard about it! Grumble whine.
To make up for my disappointment I figured some camera therapy was in order. The clouds obliged, and I got not a spectacular shot but just a fun one. No perspective correction etc... just sharpen and adjust the color.
I had a slightly different color balance here still trying to decide which I like better.
This turned out to be one of those moments where you just see a situation and grab a quick shot, not expecting much and when you get home and play with it, you get blown away. This was a 3 shot bracket, and walk away to catch the train deal. My first rough processing looked good and has had 60+ likes on Facebook in a very short period, so I went back this morning to try to optimize the shot for sharpness so I could print it at 16x24. That shot is the one below. I took the RAW files, and processed them in ACR to TIFF files, mostly for WB correction and sharpening.
I then imported the three files into Photomatix, selected a pre-set that got me the closest to what I wanted then continued to tweak it until it looked right. Saving that file I opened it in Photoshop and adjusted the curves, levels, brightness and contrast. Then I upsized it so it could be printed larger, partially corrected the perspective, watermarked it and then saved it.
I'm excited to see it in print!
