Wednesday, February 04, 2009

View out the Window

I just got wowed by some free software. Here is a picture of a bird that i took through my window (not very clean and with a screen):

Now here is another picture of the bird taken at the same time, but after clicking on "Method 1" in Photoperfect Express:

I could maybe have achieved the same result in a 30 minutes or so with GIMP, and maybe I'd do better if I put in a couple of hours. But this took about 30 seconds. And that includes downloading and installing the software.

Those bright little spheres are mountain ash berries. They are edible, but I don't think they taste good even to birds. The birds cleaned out the grapes by the end of October, but here it is February and there are still mountain ash berries on the tree even though they do eat them.

The berries definitely don't taste good to me. Maybe I need to try some different preparation methods.

3 comments:

Dana Lee Ling said...

Almost looks like maybe the software used something like the retinex filter, but in a more intelligent way than GIMP sometimes uses the technology. Sometimes just a rebalance has a similar effect of removing the gray "fog" in an image. Nice image in any case, and at 30 seconds fast.

Milan said...

To me, it looks like an automatic levels adjustment. I don't know about GIMP, but in Photoshop the key combination is 'Apple-shift-L.'

Anonymous said...

The only good way to eat Mountain Ash Berries is as jelly. Boil them up, strain the juice and add lots of sugar