This evening, I've been testing some new code in my Lightroom export plugin for SmugMug that deals with replacing images already uploaded to SmugMug. In order to be able to quickly see whether a new image has replaced an old one, I would first go into Lightroom's develop module and slam some random slider to its hilt, making a wildly different result that, once uploaded, I could easily ascertain was different from the old one.
After things were working and I pushed out the new version of the plugin, I paused to actually look at the image my random testing had left me with, and I was struck by how pretty it was. When I started the testing, I happened to have on my screen the butterfly image from this evening's post, so that's what I used, and the image above is what I was left with.
It looks less dazzling when viewed on my consumer-level Dell monitor, but in Lightroom, on my higher-end Eizo monitor, it's pretty amazingly vibrant.
I've posted before about interesting/funky/amazing effects you can achieve with the develop controls in Lightroom (see some of the links in the “Related posts” box below), but this one was quite serendipitous.