Orangutan at the Fort Wayne Zoo (2002)

Back in 2002 when I lived in Fort Wayne, I had an annual pass to the zoo. I liked to do laps around the zoo -- it was a scenic place to get exercise. And: I also took along my new (at the time) Sony DSC-F707 to take lots of pictures.

One of my favorite exhibits was the orangutan room. The orangutans were 'sealed in' behind a glass wall (see what I said a few days ago about taking your pick between shooting pictures through a dirty filter or not shooting at all...). Suffice it to say -- by the time that my pass expired, I had collected quite a few orangutan pictures.

First up is the original JPEG image that was shot through my DSC-F707.

For the next image, I sent the file through Corel Aftershot Pro. (I also have Corel PaintShop Pro X6, but I haven't really used it yet. I tried once, and my computer froze up. I think it was because the program was loading into its memory all of the hundreds of photos that were in the chosen file folder. I'm going to play around and see if I can come up with something to make it work. I picked it up for $28 in the week following Black Friday/Cyber Monday.)

At the end of the editing process in Aftershot Pro, I saved the file as both a JPEG and a TIF, hoping that I might be able to get a little bit more out of the image as a TIF when I sent it through Photomatix. At this point, I'm not sure whether I like the Corel version or the Photomatix version. Which do you prefer?