I spent majority of my time in the last few weeks going through my hard drives and sorting through thousands of pictures I took in the last five years. I never sorted through them before because i was always traveling and taking some more which created quite a backlog.
Looking at some of my old photos I came up with a great tip for beginners which I could have used when I was in Tuscany back in 2005. If your camera has that capability ALWAYS SHOOT IN RAW.
Tuscany is one of the most beautiful places in the world and i was fortunate enough to have my first DSLR with me which was the original Rebel but all of the shots I took are JPGs. Now there are quite a few nice ones but there are a few that could have used some exposure adjustment and fixing in the post production - sunny day and narrow streets will create some difficulties with bright sky and dark shadows on the street.
So if your image does need some adjusting - if you have the RAW file you will have much better chance of fixing up some of those issues (up to a point) than working with a JPG file. In theory - you can move up to 4 stops up or down if you need to - but if you underexposed your shot by 4 stops you have a whole different problem.
So here is an example and here is how I manage to "improve" it:
I took the original image into Camera Raw or Lightroom - and by the way you can open JPGs in the Camera Raw through Adobe Bridge - and made 5 copies of it - on 2 I lowered the exposure by -2/3 and -1 1/3, the other 2 the exposure was increased by 2/3 and 1 1/3.
Load up those 5 images into some HDR software and the miracle happens - after few tweaks the detail in the shadows is back and the sky is darker (not so much in this cloudy day image).
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