You Often Ask, "What Camera Do You Use Steve"?, "What Scanner Do You Use Drew"? Those Are the Wrong Questions.
What you should say is, "Nice electronic darkroom technique Steve/Drew for every picture they post." Let me explain.
Here is an awful digital picture, mainly because of the lighting, I took last evening. I was holding the top-of-the-line Cannon in my hands with one of their excellent lenses, say about $5000 worth. The camera was set on fully automatic and working perfectly.
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railfan44.rrpicturearchives.net]
With good software all I did was rotated it, sharpened it, color corrected it (it was too blue, a common problem in dark digital pictures and older slides), corrected the contrast, and brightened the dark end. Maybe this took me two minutes. The result -- an acceptable and interesting picture.
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railfan44.rrpicturearchives.net]
"Oh Steve/Drew, what processing software do you use?" I use "Picture Window Pro 5.0" and, if there is noise or if it is a scan which always has noise added by the scanner, "Neat Image". I didn't need to use "Neat Image" for the example picture.