Yesterday when I came home the sun was shining and it was beautiful out. I grabbed the camera and started taking some pictures. I decided to do some experimentation with working in raw mode. Higher end digital cameras can save images in what is called a raw mode. In raw mode the image is saved exactly as it comes off the sensor with no adjustments for white balance, sharpening or anything else. There is also no lossy compression that you get when you save to jpeg. Here is one image of a tree in my front yard exactly as it came out of the camera.
Then I played around with the Image in Gimpshop, an open-source free clone of photoshop. This is what I eventually got.
I took some photography classes when I was in high school, and did a lot of darkroom work. But I can do so much more now with images than I ever could them. And all without the smelly chemicals.