Editing effort

[Carpy2001]

I found 1 of my female crested gecko's buried in the substrate of the viv last night, she was laying eggs (bugger more babies on the way) so I tried to take a picture of her, this was around 9pm, they have a small uv light in the viv, but nothing else, due to them being nocturnal and having no eyelids I could not use a flash, so thought take the picture and see what can be done in post. I was amazed that I got anything when you look at the original image, I am quite pleased with it, although not a great image, it does show that something can be had from even the darkest raw file lol.

Original

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[Mintchocs]

What RAW file and how did you process it? I found DXO Pureraw really helped with underexposed files.

 

[Carpy2001]

Sorry should have said Mintchocs, it is a panasonic RAW2 file, I used a mixture of Silkypix 8, Photoscape x and Photoshop express, all of which are free programs lol. I find that sometime 1 program will do somethings better than another for some reason, but I am quite new to all this. I used expsoure bias, HDR and gamma correction, then tried to clean it up with noise reduction. Oh and a slight crop.