It's beautiful sand, and tricky to get the color balance. The new GIMP 2.10 makes some of this easier, so I made a new edit on one of the photos. These were photos I took before I had better control of the photography itself.
The Unsharp Mask took in GIMP 2.10 is also better. Easier to use, I can see the effect, and does a better job os sharpening with fewer artifacts. This image is the best I know how to do... right now. Click on it to get a bigger version.
I wasn't all that happy with the color balance in the Dunhuang sand. It's very sensitive to variations in light and nothing looked right. So, I did a manual white balance from a grey card and got color I liked better.
Then Blogger threw a wrench into the works. With the camera pointed straight down, it doesn't really know which way is up so it makes a guess. Some images are properly horizontal, others are rotated 90 degrees, and some are rotated 270. GIMP asks me what I want, and brings the image in horizontally. I do the edits. Upload to Blogger and it goes by the original EXIF data, which makes the lighting strange to my eye.
I tried various ways to get the image horizontal. The only one that worked was to open the image with Digital Photo Pro, rotate, export as TIFF, edit that in the GIMP to do color balance. Yes, it comes out horizontal as I want, but yeow. What a hassle. There must be a better way.
The image below is of the manual white balance one, but it's a quick edit to see if the concept works. I overdid the contrast adjustment. I also notice a color shift between the thumbnail below and the enlarged view; the latter goes pretty strongly green-blue. Sigh. This works better in Second Life slide shows, where what I import is what I see on the display.
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