One of the things that several blogs and websites have talked about is saving your RAW files so you can go back and take a second (or third) look at pictures when you've learned something new or gotten a new program or whatever might produce a different/better resulting image. As I've been trying to work on my post-processing techniques I have picked up a few things that have helped me get better results on my finished pictures. I still don't want to over process my photos and I'd like to stick with basic editing techniques so I was extremely excited when I learned how to get my finished photos as sharp as I thought they should be. Previously I was struggling to get my photos from RAW files to look even as sharp as the JPEG's straight out of the camera. Imagine my elation when I was able to get a photo to look better than my camera could. That meant I was finally starting to get some real benefit from shooting in RAW. One of the photos I had previously been pretty disappointed with was the photo of Buxton park that I took last winter. If you remember I was on my way to work and I stopped and handheld my camera out my car window and took the shot with my 50mm (no IS) lens. After PP the shot just didn't look as good as I had hoped and printing it off at 8 x 10 confirmed my suspicions. It was such a cool scene and I was pretty bummed about the lack of quality. Fast forward about 8 months and I decided to "re-process" the photo and see what I would get. The resulting image was much better than before and about as good as I had originally hoped.
Here are the before and after shots.
Before...
...after
