Bangalore 2005 – Remastered and Remixed
When I went to Bangalore, India in November 2005 on a business trip, I brought our new Canon Rebel XT along and shot a ton of pictures. Following good DSLR practices, I shot all of my pictures in RAW format so I could get maximum quality and so I could fix problems more easily.
Every night, I did a very quick conversion of the pictures from RAW to JPEG so that I could upload them to my SmugMug site. This allowed everyone back home to get a near real time update of my travels.
The problem was that I didn’t spend a lot of time – heck, any time – on editing. There is a huge difference in RAW converters – and if you don’t have them set up right, you may not get the best quality. The colors may not be accurate due to incorrect white balance, the sharpening may be too much or too little, the exposure may be wrong, or many other things.
The front gate at Mysore Palace
I always intended to go back and do it right – and didn’t get around to it until now. Using Canon’s free Digital Photo Professional, I went back and edited all of the pictures to get them how I wanted them. I mainly did it to get used to using DPP – since it’s widely claimed to have the best RAW conversion of any program. This makes sense since it comes directly from Canon. The downside is that the workflow is odd.. at best.
I also used a beta of DxO Optics to fix some images with severe lens distortion – typically when I had my Canon 17-85mm IS lens zoomed all the way out and stood too close to my subject.
The results of my conversion were great – see for yourself!
Before:
LOTS of barrel distortion at 17mm!
After:
Corrected with DxO Optics
Check out the rest of my gallery on my SmugMug gallery: Link