Some Malaysia travel snaps (with a little work from LR3 and Sagelight)

As is my practice now, I only took my little Fuji F900EXR camera with me on our recent trip to Malaysia and Bali.  I continue to be impressed with this tiny but powerful camera, and have recently been exploring what be done with a little further processing.  Over the last 6 months or so, I had fallen out of love with Adobe Lightroom for processing, and had moved to a fantastic product called Sagelight.  I have sort of moved back to Lightoom now, but these shots have a bit of work from both.  I’ll be adding to the post over the next few days, but just wanted to get a few shots up.

This first one is of the amazing Blue mansion or Cheong Fatt Tze mansion (the first name from it’s colour, and the second from it’s original owner).

This was taken as a 120 deg pano on the Fuji, and close in it tends to distort excessively, as do most autopano cameras. I have been experimenting with Lightroom 3 (LR3) to correct some of this (using the ‘distortion control in lens corrections), and it can help somewhat, as shown above. In this shot I also used LR3 to balance the tones, which were overexposed on the right hand side, and to lighten the shadows selectively in the porches and window bays. I also took the liberty of cloning out an unsightly couple of new skyscrapers behind the building, which I did with the wonderful wire tool and cloning stamp in Sagelight.  To see the snap at a larger size, just click on it, as with all the shots below.

Here’s another pano, this time of somewhere we actually stayed – the excellent Cameron Highlands Resort, in the mountains north of KL.  I took the shot some way back from the hotel, but despite this there was quite a bit of curvature distortion.  Using the Lightroom corrections, i was able to eliminate almost all of this, and to get much more contrast into a shot taken on a pretty dull and muggy day. Click on the shot to get a better view.