Buckeye, Arizona.

This week I thought I’d share the Cellpic Sunday image in a different way. On a beautiful Arizona evening, we walked just short of a mile to the nearby Sundance Golf Course and Restaurant. From the patio of the restaurant, there is a great view of the putting green and some of the course. In the background is the White Tank Mountain Range.

About the photos: While Lynn and I were sitting and waiting for our meal to arrive, I captured the late afternoon image from the patio. When I want to share an image with my friends right away on Facebook, I usually run the image through Snapseed, a photoprocessing app that I still use regularly on my cellphones for quick edits on the fly. The program does a nice job of editing but in the bright light of the late afternoon, it’s not always easy to see the final results on the smallish cell phone screen.

For this post, I decided to share the Snapseed version I posted as well as a “final image” processed on my desktop computer via Lightroom and Luminar AI. The Snapseed-processed image is on the left (top in the WordPress Reader). Looking at the image on my desktop, it’s easy to see that Snapseed adjusted the exposure too high (probably based upon my view of the image on a bright outdoor patio). The image tinted a bit to the yellow in the grass of the putting green and the mountains in the background suffer from overexposure.

Moving to the second image, as usual, I clicked the Auto exposure function in Lightroom to start processing. Lightroom’s Auto function usually overexposes images by about one stop, so I often back the exposure down while leaving most of the other automatic adjustments alone. I added a touch of contrast, cropped as necessary, then exported the image to Luminar AI. From there I added my usual adjustments to structure, detail, Accent, and Landscape settings.

Note, if you are not in the reader, you will see a slider in the middle of the image. Use that slider to compare the final results of the two images.

John Steiner