YouTube video by Bill Barnum

YouTube video by PBS Space Time

Before and after.(Ok, it's after, then before, but no one says it that way).Anyways, little tread things on the sidewalk, plus almost-sunset light. Process: I take a photo on my phone with the quality set to raw, which gives me a large, unprocessed file. Which is why the original looks really flat and gray - there's more information in the file than the screen can really show. Next, I import whichever individual picture I like into Adobe Lightroom. In Lightroom, I adjust the brightness and contrast across different tonal zones of the imageOn some images, I do so for different areas within the frame. For this one, I selected and performed adjustments on the sky and foreground. I also do color balance and saturation adjustments, and adjustments to sharpness, clarity and dehaze.I crop the image. If it's for Instagram, like this one is, I crop it into a square, a 1:1 ratio. I have Lightroom autocorrect the perspective - essentially it straightens out the image and squares things up the best it can. On this image, the only things I used automated processes on were those adjustments and the selection of the sky and foreground. For many images, I will select things myself using gradients or brushes, but the automated sky select works pretty well without looking weird. For all the adjustments to how the image actually looks, I'm poking the sliders up and down myself. Oh and finally, I use the vignette tool to darken the edges. I've always done it. My hands still remember how to move to burn in the edges under an enlarger...but now it's just a slider on a touchscreen. Much quicker, but not as fun as using a piece of cardstock with a ragged hole in the middle of it in a dark room.