Today started out as one of “those” days. It was still dark when we left the house to walk down to the beach, but the colorful glow already visible announced the sunrise to follow. So we picked up our pace in order to (hopefully) get to the park in time to get a picture of the morning’s colors.

I went ahead, managed to get into position, and started taking photos. Today I was carrying my Canon M6 with a short telephone zoom lens.

But what I saw displayed on the camera’s screen was vastly different from what my eyes were seeing.

Here’s what the camera delivered. The camera wasn’t capturing the colors visible to the eye. Most of the color was missing, and replaced by sort of a purple cast to the whole image.

It was very disappointing, to say the least.

But luckily I was using so-called “raw” format, which saves the original data before the camera guessing how it should be displayed.

When I got home, I loaded the raw file into Adobe Lightroom. It turned out that all it really needed was an adjustment to the color “temperature,” which shifted everything from slightly blue to more closely match what visible to my eyes.

Here’s the same photo that has been “corrected.” Much better, and true to the way it appeared to us.

So it goes. It’s always an adventure.

One of Apple’s advances in its newly announced iPhones is that they will be able to capture and save in a digital negative format that retains the same raw data. That’s progress that I welcome.