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Skyline Drive

Last weekend Sherri and I took a sightseeing drive on Skyline Drive through the Shenandoah National Park. I highly recommend taking this trip soon if you are anywhere near the Northern Virginia area. While this is always an enjoyable trip it is especially dramatic at this time of year. Skyline Drive is spotted with numerous overlooks with extraordinary views of the valleys below. Its hard to find a bad view or subject with a camera.

I’m sorry for my lack of posts the past week. My job at WorthPoint has kept me busier than normal with an upcoming event that we hope to be able to announce soon. If you’re interested in Antiques and Collectibles then head over to WorthPoint now and register on the site now. I’m leaving tomorrow for a trip to Colubus, OH to discuss our organizations focus on social media and communities. This is a subject that has kept my interest for the past few years and I am excited to be able to put my experience into action. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take some photos of Columbus as well.

Enough of the ramblings. Here’s a few more photos from Skyline Drive. Enjoy these and look in the next few days for the ones taken when Sherri and I decided to take a hike through the wilderness there.

Tags: Digital Photography, Shenandoah National Park, skyline drive, Virginia

Autumn Hues Picture Style

In a previous post I talked about the various Picture Styles available for Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software. The Autumn Hues style has become a favorite of mine, especially with the abundance of photos available at this time of year for this treatment.

Canon describes the Autumn Hues style like this “The Autumn Hue Picture Style file stands out the beauty of autumn such as red maple leaves and maidenhair trees. Not only does it reproduces yellow and red vividly, but it also considers the balance of blue sky and greens and unites the colorfulness and delicacy.”

Below you can see a photo recently taken at Shenandoah National Park and how I use the style.
Original untouched jpg using Landscape style in the camera:

After applying the Autumn Hues picture style through DPP (slightly cropped with no other modifications):

You can see how the yellows and reds are more prominent in this one. One downside though is that it also enhanced the reds in the clouds which I didn’t care for. The next one was slightly modified in Elements to tone down the red sky, enhance the blues and adjust the levels in the trees slightly.

This was probably not the best photo to display this style but you can get an overview of what it can do from them. Play with it yourself and let me know what you think. You can download Autumn Hues and find installation instructions here.

Here are the three photos side by side for comparison:

Tags: autumn, Autumn Hues, canon, Digital Photography, fall, landscape, picture styles, Shenandoah National Park