Blueberries for breakfast! What a great idea… yes, let’s plant some bushes just on the edge of the front yard… and we’ll have blueberries for our pancakes or waffles. Yes!! That was the conversation about 20 years ago when the front lawn went in and blueberry picking… and eating… was an anticipated pleasure. It didn’t exactly work out the way we thought.

As the bushes grew and the fruit production increased, so did the chipmunks and birds who enjoyed the harvest of the sweet little fruits!! I even tried bird netting… which the chipmunks could get under… and several times a day during the picking season had to rescue birds caught in the net. So, we rarely got more than 3 or 4 ripe berries at a time. But, early this morning out in the yard throwing the Frisbee with Jack, I realized that there was actually enough ripe fruit hanging for breakfast! I just had to see it as a competitive sport… and beat them to ’em!

Of course, I had to photograph my triumph over the critters and carried them back to the studio before I put them on my cereal. I love the variety of colors and the softness of the tones… and while I was processing the image, it occurred to me to  that the blueberries were a perfect example to show the effects of “noise” that occurs when using a sharpening tool in any of the processing programs… and also the way that the Adobe Lightroom “Luminance” tool can correct the “noise”. Noise is the grainy appearance the image has when it’s been sharpened. It actually looks like clumps of color have separated out from the smooth blend of tones you expect to see. The first image here has been over-sharpened to show a lot of noise. The second has the Lightroom Luminance applied at 100 on the scale. When overdone like this, the image starts to look like a painting with all the blending going on. With the right subject it’s kind of cool! Now… breakfast!

Blueberry over-sharpened… noise or a grainy look.

Blueberry over-smoothed with Luminance slider in Adobe Lightroom.