Just Want to Share a Secret Tool

My friend, graphic designer, photographer, speaker and author, Mark Heaps, helped develop a brand new plug-in for Light Room that helps with editing your photos.  The plugin, called Reactive Exposure, can be found by going to RAWPlugins.com and it changes the way you edit your images and costs only $29!

The Plug-in is designed to "speak natively with Adobe Lightroom" by adjusting the Luminosity and Tone controls as a response to Exposure controls.

I have been playing with this plug in a lot this past week. I've been going back in my archives finding images that I took a few years back that I probably should have tossed, since they seemed to have very little information in them, but I guess I was waiting for something that "brought them back to life."  I start out the Reactive Exposure plug-in and try to determine how the image looks like it has the "correct" exposure. I then make adjustments from there, opening up shadows, decreasing highlights as I feel the image needs.  Here are some of my before and afters.

BEFORE
AFTER
As I stated, the first picture is really very blah and probably should have been deleted. The second image still wouldn't win any awards, but look at all the detail I was able to get from it by using the plug in. 
BEFORE
AFTER 
Again, I was able to pull a lot more detail from the landscape above than I had originally been able to get from it. 

The plug-in doesn't work for every single photo but it seems to bring me to a better "starting point" in images that have a very dynamic range and I'm not sacrificing colors or details. I'm going to keep on using this plug-in and I am excited to share my findings with fellow photographers.

Let's all keep on showing the beauty in this world, cause lately all we seem to be seeing is the bad.

Keep on photographing, friends!

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