September morning in my backyard (3)

I walked out this September morning and noticed the play of light of the early sun in the trees. All I had was a cheap digital camera with no control over the exposure. I took the picture and loaded it in Corel Photo-Paint 8.

Unlike the other two pictures in this folder, this one was underexposed and had very high contrast, the trees were essentially a big blob of black. I used my Pixie Dust Pro plug-in to fix it. First, I used the Exposure filter. Using the Exponential method, which is more subtle than the Quadratic method I used on the other two pictures, I increased the exposure of all three chanels to +100%. Then I applied the Subdue Contrast filter. Finally, I resampled the image at 50% with anti-aliasing turned off.

This picture took more experimentation with the filters than the other two. In fact, for a while it seemed like I could not save it at all. I could have used a stronger exposure filter (i.e., the Quadratic method). It would have given me more detail, but the play of the light of the early sun would have been lost.

I'm sure the picture would look better if shot on film, but I had to use what I had available.