Moorhead, Minnesota.

The Red River of the North in the summer is calm and serene, but it can and does flood regularly in the spring and sometimes during the summer. One of the few rivers on the continent that flows north into Canada, it’s the boundary between Minnesota and North Dakota. This view of the river may look familiar to those who might have seen my mini-review of the Samsung S20U. For that review, I used the photo directly out of the camera to provide you, dear reader, with an example of what the camera will do without having to resort to post-processing tools.

About the photo: As noted above, the image was captured with the Samsung Galaxy S20U. I used automatic exposure which the camera set to 1/2500 sec, f/1.8, and ISO-16. For post-processing, the tools selected were my usual complement of Adobe’s Lightroom and Skylum’s Luminar 4 to bring out some extra detail hidden in the image. For comparison, below is the out-of-camera image.  The major change to the image is a minor detail on the extreme left edge. There’s a lone fisherman trying his luck from the river bank. I used Luminar’s masking tool to lift the exposure to bring him out of the shadow created by the low exposure needed to properly expose the bright blue sky. The last tweaks I made were to remove the cell phone tower in the background and a concrete block that was above the fisherman from the final image using the spot removal tool in Lightroom. That concrete block looks like a lens flare in the images and I thought it looked better being gone altogether.

As always, if your browser supports it, you can get a closer view of either image by clicking on them.

John Steiner