Microdew!

Stop licking your lips! I wrote microdew, not microbrew.

While out this morning with the wide-angle lens I saw many leaves covered with (to me) unusually small droplets of dew, an intriguing effect. Here’re the image I like best (figure 1, worth clicking to enlarge), as well as a couple from a micro-be-dewed heap of Gingko leaves (figures 2, 3).

These were all quickly edited in Luminar 4. I’m still not sure what I think of that editor because its AIs and presets go without exception for stagey effects that need toning down. It’s like they were made for the folks who became addicted to HDR images. Not that HDR is all bad; the iPhones have been doing excellent, quite natural-looking HDR for years now.

I use Affinity Photo rather than the Adobe equivalents these days because I won’t pay for the subscription. But it’s seductive to just throw stuff at Luminar’s AIs and let them do one’s thinking rather than toiling through manually (so to speak) in Affinity.

These editors (let’s include the one in Apple’s Photos and Google’s SnapSeed) are like the supermarkets in Scranton. None of them can save you the hour-long trip to the nearest Whole Foods in Allentown, but each does have strengths. Unfortunately, those strengths are complementary, not overlapping, so one needs to visit more than one to get anything like full coverage. I hope Joe Biden will look into this.