Flower and Sunset: 1/8000s f/3.5 ISO400 50mm -0.7ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

A Thanksgiving trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium gave me some interesting photo opportunities, not all of them involving sea creatures. Sitting down to lunch, I snapped the photo above, just after the table has been relaid, and just before people were shown to it.

I literally snapped it, picking up my camera and pressing the shutter to seize the moment. Only later did I get chance to view the result and see how the camera had been set up at the time. This is what I had:

Since I was shooting RAW, the tungsten white balance could easily be adjusted out. The image had been underexposed two-thirds of a stop on top of metering on the bright sky, so the detail on the table was lost in the shadows.

After adjusting the white balance I increased the saturation to 1.8 and then started on the levels. By boosting the shadows with the Highlights and Shadows control and making some heavy changes to the Levels control, I was able to obtain a much better image. But the shadows, now light enough for detail, showed some very ugly blotches of color caused by chroma noise (100% crop):

Chroma Blur to the rescue. Chroma Blur is one of the RAW Fine Tuning settings hidden behind a disclosure triangle at the top of the adjustments pane and is normally set to 2.0. I boosted it all the way to 10.0 to achieve the result I was looking for:

A side effect of this adjustment is that the flower petals have dark edges -- that's not as the scene actually was, but in the final image if helps make them stand out against the light background.

Here are the final settings:

Notice that I changed the levels by moving the top triangle controls, not the lower markers. I find this often gives better control.