While playing with the swimming photos in Photoshop, I discovered how cool a digital camera can be. As I played with the levels in a picture that the background looked almost completely black, the background began to appear. In real life you could really only see just faintly what was in the background, but in pictures with a traditional camera, black is what I would have been stuck with. Don’t ask me how it works to be able to pick up the background at night, maybe Shawn could tell you, he seems to know all this kind of stuff, but with a digital camera it gets it somehow and I can make it appear! Compare the original and the lightened one:
Freedom will be mine! 
June 6, 2006 at 1:16 am
You think that’s cool, you ought to use the curves tool instead. Here’s a great tutorial on using the curves command in Photoshop. It applies to the GIMP as well.
Using the curves tool you can boost the background without washing out the foreground. Of course it doesn’t work perfectly when the original is so close to either white or black, but it still works wonders.
June 6, 2006 at 1:20 am
As to the digital camera seeing what you and I cannot, I’m sure you know this already but when the digital camera takes a picture it tries its best not to have any completely balck or white pixels in an image. Completely while pixels would be considered overexposed and completely black would be underexposed.
If you look at the histogram you can see that there is a huge peak close to the black end, but then there are pixels darker than that, and those are the houses and the mountains and the sky that come out when you adjust the levels or play with the curves tool.
The photoreceptors on the CCD of the camera are very light sensative and they can detect slight variations that can be exaggerated later. Obviously the tonal quality is bad because you don’t have near the range at that low light level, but it’s still amazing that it’s there at all.