On the issues of improving the gamma of certain areas of an image and of carrying out sharpening last and taking due care to not irreversibly degrading the only copy, the original, of an image I wonder if shooting RAW and using processing software such as Lightroom may help as a head start.

Lightroom, like other software of its ilk and I use this program having invested in Pixmantec’s Rawshooter which Adobe bought up, alters images during editing by using metadata files containing a record of any changes worked. The only time the changes are irretrievably applied is at the point of export as JPEG or TIFF and these changes are only applied to the exported image and not the original which is preserved so that a very different looking image could be created if one so chooses but once again without irreversibly altering the original.

Lightroom has many subtle controls for revealing detail in shadows, and with digital it is a common axiom to underexpose by a half stop or so. BTW this is easily fed in quickly with the dial control on the left of a Dynax 7, 7D, both of these cameras have an equally useful flash compensation dial immediately below on the same spindle, the Sony Alpha 100 is not quite so convenient here as I think is true of other digital SLRs well worth exploring this.

If highlights are blown then Lightroom has the ability to reclaim some detail here if not too severe, plus many other useful gamma and colour adjustment capabilities.

I apologize to those familiar with such software and also to those who may prefer an alternative.

I cannot stretch to Photoshop CS, why do Adobe have to make it so darned expensive not everybody can quickly recoup the cost of this, but the Lightroom and Elements route suffices for me. To be sure some times I miss the use of masks but a surprising amount can be done with elements when required, Elements 1 at that as I dislike the resource hogging extras with later versions which intercept any memory device and thus interfere with import of other data types.

My new laptop became almost unusable when I put a later Elements on it last year, with a dual core processor and 2GB RAM, and after finding a helpful O’Reilly page which informed on how to circumvent some of Elements resource intrusions I finally gave in, uninstalled Elements and finding this did not cure all issues re-installed XP Pro. Fortunately I had purchased a self install version of XP Pro and it was early days with this computer.