London Street: Waterloo Tube & Consulting the Map

In keeping with this week's theme, I'm posting two photos, with their unedited versions.

This first, SOOC shot, is a very unexposed photo of Dianna, Brian & Emily consulting the map, deciding which double-decker bus to take next.

Nobody is patient or trusts my map reading; I have to hold the map 1" from my nose. Yesterday, I found out an icky, luck-of-the-draw, reason why. It turns out that I have the beginnings of cataracts!!!!!

I lost my sun glasses in London, and really hate glare. I have been frustrated with my glasses this past year, and thought it outrageous that less than a year later, I seemed to need new glasses. Losing the sunglass clips gave me justification to check out new glasses.

I'm very excited about the prospect of seeing better, but was not happy to hear the word "cataracts," or the words "$700!" Could be worse, but I'm bummed (no, wait! I'm cantankerous about it); think of the much more exciting lens I could buy with this money!

This photo, while not great, would have been a total reject without having shot it in Camera Raw. In ACR, I increased the exposure, increased black and recovered the detail in the shadows. In CS3, I added contrast with luminosity blend mode, and sharpened. (yep! us ancient ones will probably want LOTS of sharpening in our photos.)
This next shot is a street scene in London near the Waterloo Tube station. The first photo is SOOC.

For this editing, I decided to tweak the photo using Scott Kelby's "recipe." I opened it in Camera RAW, slid Recovery, Fill Light, Contrast, Clarity & Vibrance all the way to the right. Then I opened it as a Smart Object (press Shift).

In CS3, right click and make it a New Smart Object Via Copy. In layers, I double-clicked the image thumbnail, which brings you back to Camera Raw. In the menu in the Basic palette, I selected Camera Raw Defaults. Once this opens in CS3, I changed the Blending Mode to "Color", and played with the opacity, and flattened. I wanted a little more intensity and then ran an acid action on it, giving me this colored-pencil-like version.

(And this photo better look really, really good when I look at it with my frickin' new $700 glasses.) (At least I'll get to show you a picture of them when I get them.